


Guilt and Other Pastimes of the Living

by DinosaurTheology



Series: Brief, Brilliant Miracles [8]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition, Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Demonic Possession, Demons, F/F, F/M, Friendship/Love, Guilt, Love, Magic, Psychological Trauma, Shame, Survivor Guilt, The Fade, Unresolved Emotional Tension, Unresolved Romantic Tension, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-24
Updated: 2015-08-24
Packaged: 2018-04-10 23:03:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 22,322
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4411316
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DinosaurTheology/pseuds/DinosaurTheology
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A subtle, sinister force threatens Josephine Montilyet and the whole Inquisition community in Skyhold. Leliana and Blackwall help the Ambassador to fight her personal demons... and their own.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Fevered Fade

**Author's Note:**

> Dragon Age is not mine, but my goodness such richness in these characters to explore. I tried to stretch them to their breaking points, here, a few times.

Empress Celene's Satinalia Fete, on the fourth day of Umbralis in 936 Dragon, could not have seemed more decadent to a girl just finished with her final year of school at the Universita di Rialto. That was where Josephine Montilyet's father had sent her to learn the theories of economics and diplomacy that would help her to run their delicate, far flung trading enterprises, in the far twilight of his retirement. The Orlesian court and its Great Game, she'd argued passionately on her graduation night, in the bright peacock robe that marked her as a laurea in the school of government and political philosophy, was the laboratory in which she would put what she had learned to the test.

It was moreover, she'd teased a fourteen year old Yvette later that night over cups of blackberry cordial, a place of intrigue and romance--both sorely lacking at the University. The black robed boys there, adorned with the colored sashes of their schools, clubs and societies, were deeply involved with their studies, duelling and drinking, late night debates about the nature of man and Maker, rowing matches on Rialto Bay. Yvette, who rarely left the Montlyet town house without an escort, could not imagine a more wonderful place and pined for her chance, in two years, to visit this wonderful place and study painting, mosaic assemblage, pottery, all the other arts and the young men besides.

Halamshiral, though... Halamshiral... it was more than Josephine could easily fathom! Her first weeks in Orlais, attached to an ambassador from the Rivaini court in Dairsmuid, had allowed her access to music, rich foods and wine, stolen kisses under her sponsor's terrace, drunk on the heady musk of winding night jasmine, with other boys and girls who lived the lives of bards. There was also occasional, tantalizing glimpse of an impossibly beautiful, pale woman with flaming red hair, but Josie might have been just imagining that in her excitement over the new life she was living. 

When the invitation came for Lady Vaudre to attend the Satinalia Fete, she was chosen from among the half dozen apprentice bards and dimplomats to accompany her because of a generally steady nature and proven head for figures. "Besides," she argued, flashing the quick smile that the quite, mahogany dark Rivaini matron's entire household had come to love, "I am Antivan... Satinalia is our holiday. If you want anyone at this Fete, my lady, it would be me." Vaudre laughed, stroked Josephine's long, dark hair and indulged her, something she was too willing to do with all her charges. Kindness, Josie had learned in the intervening years, could be as murderou, as wicked, as a Crow's poisoned dagger.

When she arrived at Halamshiral, though, Josephine realized that she had maybe spoken out of turn. The Lords and Ladies of Celene's Winter Court swanned in cloaks made, in more than one instance, of actual swan feathers, phoenix tails, wyvern dewlaps, cockatrice combs and Lady Vaudre pointed out, breathless, one Duc maned in the flowing, crystaline headpiece of a Greater Mistral's mature drake. She was, herself, masked as the many toothed fish that had been worshipped in Llomerryn before the coming of the Chantry, the legendary raider fish, its fangs tipped by little chips of pink diamond. Josephine, in the simple black ears and dusty fur of an Arvaud fennec felt like less than a shadow next to all the grandeur. Why, it was said that even the Divine herself might be here! The women known as her Right and Left hands might be, too, and stories about their prowess and subtlety had kept Josie awake in her bed ever since arriving in Val Royeux.

Lady Vaudre patted Josie's gloved hand, murmured a sweet nothing that cloaked an imperative to keep her pretty eyes open, and floated in that lazy, graceful Rivaini way to the side of a bearish chevalier wearing lion a red lion's mane--one of the Empress' many cousins, no doubt. She laid a long, elegant hand on his thick bicep, tangled the fingers of her other hand in his mane, laughed at whatever stupid joke he was making and dabbed wine from the front of his doublet when he spilled it. These, Josie mused, were the lessons that a plump professor like Maestro Taseli could not make clear, in his introduction to diplomacy lectures. Some things had to be observed, drunk, participated in...

Suddenly all eyes swept towards the head of the ballroom. An agonizingly beautiful woman in shimmering blue silk and black vyrantium samite seemed to shimmer into view. Her silvery blonde hair was coiled in a pile of curls so intricate that one out of place might have been urgently tempting to any but the most stalwart and the holes in a simple domino mask disclosed violet eyes that could shake the strongest soul. Empress Celene I Valmont. This entire collection of Orlais' aristocracy caught its breath; Josie was not immune.

She spoke. "Mes amis... I have not seen such a handsome gathering of Orlesians since my childhood, when the Dauphin Gaspard, his sister Florianne and I were but children here at fetes thrown by my beloved uncle, the Emperor Florian. Now I have been empress a decade, against all likelihood of Maker and man. The weight of responsibility sits heavy on my shoulders, Grand-Duc Gaspard is the strong shield that guards my realm and the fete is in my honor." Her lips, startling crimson against the snowy skin, curled upwards. "I misspeak. It is foolish to say that the fete is in my honor... I hold it, but it is in your honor, my lords and ladies. 

She held her slim fist high. "We are the proudest, best people in Thedas, those who fight and win wars without even drawing a sword... a whispered word can lay our enemies lower than the masters of the Dales, and upon their ruin we built this Winter Palace. This is why I hold this fete, and all others... we, the the Orlesians, lions of Thedas."

The assembled nobility cheered, as loudly as a collection of cynical sycophants out for personal gain were ever going to anyway, and even the Antivan Josephine felt her heart leap into her throat. It was not the words, no, but the rich, husky voice that said them, how it throbbed and wove around each syllable. The beast standing beside Lady Vaudre began to sing, in a rumbling baritone: "Empress of Fire, in the reign of the lion..." A song, she knew, comparing the Valmont dynasty to the legendary Highland Ravager of Emprise du Lion.

Duc Gaspard picked it up in his high, clear tenor, "Eclipsed in the eye of the empire of we the Orlesians!" The assembled nobility, at least those native born, carried the tune. Those foreign born could do naught but appreciate the moment's poetic power. They were the guests of Orlais, slaves to her Great Game. Josephine did her best to watch, learn, suck each morsel out of Celene's performance. 

And so engaged she saw a slender, pale elven woman with a long chestnut braid held back by silver netting lay a gentle hand on the empress' arm, whisper something in her ear, and withdraw. That, Josie deduced, must have been Celene's favored handmaiden, Briala. She followed, ashen. The singers did not notice. It was appropriate, perhaps. Though a particular ruler might not be in place they would remain Orlesian and, depending on how one looked at it, either at the height of their glory or so oblivious that the attack of an archdemon might have gone unnoticed.

The crowd moved, a living being. The edges could not hold still. Something prickled out of the corner of Josephine's eye. A courier, another bard in training, skirted towards the back where she thought that the empress and Briala had gone. He was a slender youth, dark hair like a Rivaini, Antivan or one from the northern regions of Orlais, and wore the mask of a snowy cat. Josie follow, curious as to where he could have gone, what his intention could be. To tell his factor? Something more nefarious?

She followed on swift feet, less silently than she'd have hoped, and almost ran fully into him on a stairwell. He half turned, shoved his forearm into her, and growled. "Get away from me, petite sotte."

She caught his sleeve in her fingers and held on tightly. "Not until you tell me your intentions, messere. The court entire stands rapt at the anthem, but you flee after the Empress and Ambassador Briala. Who do you seek?"

"No one that is any of your business. Now let me be! I warn you." He slipped her grasp and drew a crescent slicer, one of the better made daggers common to rogues and duellists from his region of Orlais. Josie's heart leapt into her throat, a lucky thing since it kept the tart of quail eggs and spinach that she'd eaten for dinner in place. She'd known he was a northerner! One thought the most absurd things in these moments."Will you listen to reason, my lady?"

She released him and retreated, pushed harder against his shoulder than she perhaps meant to even in the circumstances, and he stepped further back than might have been necessary. It all culminated in his tumble down the flight of stairs. She followed, pulse beating through the tender skin beneath her ears, knowing what she'd find. She had not studied medicine, like her brother Laurien was, but... no man could survive with his head turned to that angle. She felt beneath his ear, the skin already cooling. Silence.

Josie pulled the snowy cat mask away, suppressed a gasp of horror. Mirabeau Eliade! One of the Comte de Jader's assistants... she had kissed him and giggled over the embarassment of his rival, Aron de Rundet, in the jasmine vines beneath Lady Vaudre's porch less than a week before. Now... now... Josephine felt tears threaten, turned away on one knee and let them fall.

She felt nothing until his hand wound into her hair, pulled her head back and drew the knife across her throat. Blood spilled down her dress' front in a hot, crimson rush. She looked up into his slack face, still turned at its impossible angle, and frozen, dead eyes. No mercy there. In a way, Josephine Montiley thought, I deserve this. There was no pain.

She awoke with a shriek,slick with sweat, from her dream.


	2. Compassion and Birdsong

Josie sat upright, gathered the sheets around her, struggled to catch her breath. It seemed to have a mind of its own, dancing a foot or more just out of her reach, refusing to be tamed by such necessities as her continued attachment to the mortal plane. Leliana appeared, silent as shade, from one of Skyhold's innumerable secret passages--just how many of them were there? That was something to immediately put Lace and her people to work figuring out. She sat on the bed, beside Josie, and gathered the younger woman into her arms, brought her head to rest beneath her chin. "Doucement, ma doux bouchinette. I won't let anything hurt you. You're safe with me."

Josephine clung to her. "Leliana. You're here. I'm here. You're here..." Josie raised an eyebrow. "What are you doing here, darling?"

She shrugged. "Sometimes I like to watch you sleep, petite chou. It's nothing important."

"We will table that for now. I had the most awful dream."

"I heard. You haven't spoken about Mirabeau and that particular Satinalia Fete in ages--even if I think it would be for the best if you would process it. Why was it on your mind?"

Before Josephine could speak, another voice joined their conversation. "It never leaves her mind. Not the front, the back. The bottom. The secret places, dungeons. Under the quick intelligence, hiding where memories go to die but cannot, no matter how much they want to. He lies there, alive as long as she is, suffering with his neck twisted around." Cole.

Fright was dissipating quickly into irritation. "Will the entire Inquisition be gathering in my bed-chamber before the night is over?"

Leliana giggled. "That could be an interesting party."

"You don't have a Chantry board to nail my smallclothes to this time, my love."

"I could find something."

Cole seemed confused. "How would that help?"

Leliana favored him with the smile that could melt the hardest hearts in Thedas. "I find, my young friend from the Fade, that stealing someone's smallclothes can improve almost any situation." Her face grew more serious. "Still... what were you doing here?"

"I could ask the same of you," Josephine said.

Leliana waved her off. "I already explained that. Now... tell me, Cole."

"I felt something, here. In the Fade."

"You almost certainly did, Cole," Josephine said. "I was here, sleeping, and dreaming very vividly. Leliana was in the passage, watching me... there must have been echoes of others in the hallway. The Fade is strange, which you must know full well better than I do."

"Yes, though not as strange as this world."

Josephine let this pass. "Was any one of these what you felt?"

"No."

"Then...?" She did not want to say it, think it, even imagine... in her bedchamber, her very dreaming soul.

"A spirit. Perhaps a demon. I did not recognize him."

"That's understandable," Josephine said. "You could hardly know everyone spirit in the Fade any more than I could know every noble in Thedas."

"But you do know every noble in Thedas."

"But they don't change at random, and the Inquisitor and Solas have indicated that spirits do." She smiled and laid her hand on Cole's hand. "Thank you for coming to tell me this."

"I don't deserve your thanks." He let his head hang. "I might not have told you anything, had you not awakened. I would not have known to, necessarily. I would have watched him, measured his movements, and done so again tomorrow night. I might have kept on watching until it was too late, until you were too far gone."

Josephine pushed the thought of possession by a malicious spirit away before hysteria threatened to overtake her. They were, she had recently learned, the manifestation of negative emotional states and giving in to one could not possibly help matter. She felt filthy, though, like something had crawled inside her and died. Much of the morning might be spent in her Antique claw-footed tub, won as spoils from a negotiation with the Arl of Redcliffe, trying hard as she could to claw her skin off with a rough sponge. "You did well, Cole. Better than anyone else could have done. What matters now is that we do something about this. We have more warning than anyone else has ever gotten, that I know of. What shall we do with it?"

"We must find some way to stop it," Leliana said, "but I fear that we are deucedly ill equipped. We are trained as bards, Josie my darling, and Cole may have insight into the world of spirits but he is no more a mage than either of us. We need someone who is an expert on the Fade and demonology."

"Yes, you speak true." Josephine worried at a strand of her hair and then twisted it all into a long braid to coil on top of her head. "Lord Trevelyan and Cassandra know a great deal about both subjects but are tending to business in the Fallow Mire--something about an Avvar chieftain's son--and they've taken Sky Watcher with them. Dorian is more at home with human spirits and Vivienne is an expert alchemist..."

Leliana chuckled. "None of them are who I am thinking of."

Josie winced. "He is so... odd."

"Ah, be kind, Josie... I have heard you talk often about how interesting the man is!"

"Yes, he is most interesting. And so is a greater nuggalope, but that does not mean that I find its massive body and tiny hands any less discomfiting."

"He is lonely. He calls at night. The plains call back to him, the forest, the mountain. His soul is not at rest, it cannot."

Both women turned to look at Cole. Leliana raised her eyebrow. "Solas?"

"No, the greater nuggalope, in the stables. His horns itch, he cannot scratch them. His tiny arms cannot reach."

Josie sighed. Talking to Cole could be... trying. Still, Leliana had a point. "You are right, my love. Solas is more knowledable about the Fade than anyone I have ever known... perhaps more than anyone ever has been, save mythical figures like Witches of the Wilds."

"Indeed. He knows more, even, than my old traveling companion Morrigan."

"Then it is settled. We will set up a meeting with him, tomorrow morning. Others too, perhaps, since I think that their expertise may be of use. Will you help me?"

"Anything, mon chou."

"I will help too..." Cole frowned. "Although you are not my cabbage."

Josie felt compelled to squeeze his shoulder. "Do not mind Leliana... she's just Orlesian. They do something to them, when they're young." She stretched the last traces of sleep from her body. "Maker's breath I am tired... but it is almost dawn. Would you like to join me for tea?"

Leliana nodded. "If there is lavendar to be had in it I would be most appreciative. I haven't slept either, if you had forgotten."

Josie rubbed the back of her neck. "How could I? You were spying on me."

"In a bard's song we would say I was 'gazing on your innocence.'"

Cole followed a step behind them, wondering if there would be pancakes in the kitchens yet.


	3. Tempest in a Teapot

The party gathered around the round table, at the base of Skyhold's mage tower. Most of their magical, and anti-magical to be honest, might was gathered in this room, at least what was not out on an expedition to the ruined Fallow Mire with Mischa Trevelyan and the particular rag-tag band of followers he'd chosen this time for chasing an irritating delegation of Avvar led by an even more irksome reaver named the Hand of Korth. Bull and Breaker Thrann, knowing a thing or two about reavers, had gone along, as had Sky Watcher, claiming specific knowledge of this particular reaver. Cassandra, unwilling to let her precious Mischa travel in such rough company alone, had packed her things with haste.

Solas, his long, delicate fingers wrapped around the handle of a steaming cup, grimaced. "I despise tea utterly. I do not know why drinking it is such a ritual in your Circles."

Vivienne laid a hand on his shoulder. From anyone else it might have been friendly; all her gestures were planned, tactical manouvres. "Because this, particular tea can thin the Veil, darling. I should think a Rift magus like you might sense such a thing. Honestly. I spent such a long time brewing it and could have blown the whole castle to the Maker."

"Ah, yes." Cullen smiled, thinly. He was sweating profusely, even in the thin, powder blue summer-weight uniform he sported. "Because we're atop a lyrium rich mountain in a haunted castle where ancient elves and Avvar performed Maker knows how many demented rituals to their heathen gods. That's exactly where we want the Veil thin."

Vivienne's voice was sharp. "It is, Commander, if we want to have any success in navigating the Fade and finding out which spirit seeks to prey on dear Josephine and what its strategy might be. Unless you just want to start running around and bashing thin air with your sword. That's the Templar way, save when you have us to guide you."

He laughed. "And the mage way, of course, is to sprout horns and tentacles and start killing everyone in sight when you don't have us to guide you."

Fiona spoke from her seat beside Cullen. "Peace, children." Vivienne heeded her old teacher where she may have no one else. "We need not re-enact the entire war between the mages and Templars in Solas' study."

Merrill wrung her hands. "That would be a bit mad, wouldn't it? We'd have to have a lot of room. And actors and props and things. Unless we did it with puppets. We'd need a lot of puppets. Could I operate the Hawke puppet, seeing he's my husband?" She glanced around the room, then down at her feet. "Sorry. I'm babbling. Sorry. I'll shut up."

Dorian sighed. "Thank you for that fascinating interlude. It was both moving and enlightening. Moving right along, I'm not quite sure why I'm involved in this adventure at all. Love Josie with all my heart though I might--" He tossed a kiss at her, where she sat by the door, "my specialized study was in necromancy. Human spirits. We're all pretty well agreed that the chap seeking to butter her biscuits is a demon, ergo non-human. I'm rather out of my wheel-house, my old sauces."

"The reason you are here, mon lapinou," Leliana said, "is because Solas believes there might be some aspect of a human spirit involved with all of this because of the particular recurring dream that Josie has been having. We're not sure precisely what is going on."

"Really?" Dorian sat up, placed his cup on the saucer in front of him. "Something traumatic from your past, amata mia?"

"Yes." Josie had her knees held against her chest, hugged tight to her. She looked up, revealed bags beneath her eyes that made their dark beauty stand out all the more clearly. "Mirabeau Eliade. He was another young bard--in training when I was. He died in an accident. It was my fault."

Blackwall, at this meeting by Josephine's request, snorted from where he stood by her and laid a heavy hand on her shoulder. "Poppycock, my lady, and you know it."

She let her head rest against his hand. "It was an accident, truly."

Fiona and Solas, the senior mages present, exchanged worried glances. The spirit's machinations had gone far indeed. Things might have to proceed at a pace each would, under more ideal circumstances, consider reckless. "What I mean," Blackwall said, "is that it isn't in any way your fault."

"I chased him, tesorino, and stopped him on the stair."

"It was at the bequest of your patron, yes?"

Josie squirmed. "Not exactly..."

Leliana spoke firmly. "Yes, exactly. A bard must go where her patron would will, even at the danger of her own life--or others'. You did well, as Lady Vaudre would have wanted, even if it did not end so. You could not have known that the empress' discomfit with Briala and young Eliade's activity had naught to do with each other."

"I could have if I'd asked, used any of the lessons in diplomacy that Maestro Taseli taught me at the university instead of charging ahead like some beserker from the Legion of the Dead chasing a band of hurlocks."

Blackwall's strong fingers rubbed the back of her neck, at the hairline. She shuddered under their sure touch. "He'd drawn a knife on you. If you'd talked Eliade would have likely gutted you on those stairs and dumped you in an alley."

"It's not exactly unknown among bards, love," Leliana said. "Marjolaine used to say that a dead rival..." She clenched her fingers and then opened them. "Was no rival at all."

"Ooh..." Merrill twisted one of her braids. "The life of a bard sounds terribly frightening. Not nearly as much fun as being a pirate, the way Isabela talked about it. Do bards sing a lot? Pirates seem to. Without disemboweling each other nearly so much."

Leliana stifled a laugh in her palm. "We do sing once in a while, petite coccinelle. It drowns out the screaming."

"That's good then. You'd not want to hear that, all the time."

"If I may speak?" Cullen's soft voice was nearly lost in the tumult.

Fiona nodded. "Of course, Commander. We asked you here for your expert advice on spirits gained through years as a Templar."

He paused a long moment, walking the dusty trails of difficult memory. "I... have had difficult dealings with a spirit before. A desire demon, though it called itself a 'spirit of choice.' It happened during the siege of Kinloch Hold, back during the Blight. I saw Stefanja Amell step between some of the younger apprentices and a clutch of hunger abominations, compatriots already lost to us. She'd just passed her Harrowing, a few weeks before... I was one of the Templars in attendance."

"She managed to slay one, with a bolt of raw Fade energy, and I charged my sword with lyrium and ran through another... but two more bore her to the ground. They ripped, tore..." He shuddered. "You must understand... we came to the tower together. She learned to control sparks while I batted other boys with a wooden sword. This was a girl I'd pined for since I was thirteen and she was fourteen. I came to respect her as an adult."

"I don't remember much else of what happened. I must have killed them. They died, at any rate, and I was left cradling the bloody rags of flesh that had been Stefanja with a voice whispering softly, so softly, in my ear, in my heart, at the very edges of my hearing... It was the sweetest and most awful voice in all Thedas and beyond." He sagged, still sweating. No one present knew how much was from the heat, the stress of the story, the agony of lyrium withdrawal. "It could have been hours or days. Maybe some of the apprentices got away, or at least out of that room."

"I remember finding you there, half-mad," Leliana said. "And I will never forget what you held in your arms. I think those were the children that Wynne saved from the rage demon, deeper in the tower."

"I can't say that I'm comforted," Cullen said, "but at least Stefanja sold her life dearly, perhaps. She was a good woman."

"I, myself, have been a demon's victim," Fiona said. "In the Deep Roads. Without King Alistair's father I'd have been consumed, like any other victim of the Fade. I wouldn't wish that fate on my worst enemy."

"I wouldn't either." Merrill. "And the finest woman I ever knew, my Keeper Marethari, sacrificed herself to my foolish pride so that I wouldn't have to suffer it."

Dorian, his long legs crossed in front of him, took another sip of the tea. "I remember another spirit of choice, as dear Cullen's friend so eloquently called itself. One of the magisters near home, he kept a little estate in the hills above Quarinus, went a little bit... queer... in the head. You know." He tapped his temple. "Some little streak of darkness in his soul. Elven slaves started disappearing, and then human slaves, liberati both elven and human, soporati of both races... and then finally even a few laetani of less important families--only elves, of course, no one too noticable."

"Certainly." Fiona snorted. "You wouldn't want to be doing anything completely outrageous, of course."

"Precisely." Dorian winked at her. "I knew you weren't just famous for those gorgeous green eyes. Anyway, the rumor mill started grinding like... er, well, a mill, I suppose. They sent a few Templars to his villa, along with some folks who could actually do something about it if he was acting out of line. One of those folks just happened to be my honored mother, which is the reason that I am able to tell you this in detail... it's not something that the good people of Tevinter are proud of you see. Which is how you know that it's utterly awful." He frowned. "The good people of Tevinter are... proud of some things that cause greater Thedas to blanche."

Blackwall sighed. "Is the point of this story coming around anytime soon, Dorian, or should we put in an order with the cooks for supper?"

"Patience, patience." He waved his hand. "Where was I? Ah, yes... now, it turns out, when Mother and her comrades arrived, the magister and question had been... tickled, shall we say, into developing a rather ravenous taste for human flesh."

After a moment of shocked silence, Fiona asked. "So... was this northern gourmet apprehended?"

"Not as such, no... they wanted to, of course. Cannibalism is a bit exotic, even for my homeland. The problem was that his larder had come up empty and his spirit friend was nowhere near finished entertaining itself. Mother told us, usually when she caught anyone talking to anything that didn't seem to be there--even if it was just an imaginary friend--that they caught the poor fellow all tucked up to the table, with a napkin in his collar and everything, choked to death on a forkful of his own intestines." He laughed like a loon. Fond childhood memories of the stories told at mother's knee, like so many things, were just different up north. "They did eradicate the spirit, though... or dissipate it, render it harmless, and send its components to the four corners of the Fade, insofar as the bloody place even has corners." 

Josephine was ashen, her face pressed against Blackwall's strong side. He grunted. "So... I'm guessing we're not going to put in an order for supper."

Solas spoke. "No, indeed. We're going to take steps. Things have not progressed to the point of no return, but they're not at a good place, either. Can't you feel it?" All the mages cast their eyes around, nervously. Even those who had no magical talent could sense tiny legs of unseen insects, dancing among the hairs on their arms and legs, at the napes of their necks. "We are in a room full of magic users, Fader walkers, Veil piercers... each of us in that line of work has danced with a demon and survived, often standing beside someone who has not. Our stories bear that out."

"Of those who do not live half in the Fade and half out, there are a warrior and a liar." He cast his glance on Blackwall and Leliana, although he did not single either out. "All have drunk the tea. The Veil is thin. Can you feel it cracking?"

They did... the pressure grew. A weight seemed to draw the floor up, pull the ceiling upon them. Green energy, bleeding from the wounded Veil, poured along cracks in the walls, crept through the windows. Leliana squawked and kicked at a tendril trying to climb up her leg. Cullen nervously fingered his vial of lyrium. Vivienne rubbed her temples. "We know that you're very impressive, Solas, darling, and something is going on... what are you trying to make us see?"

"The demon is here, and hungry. It latched onto Josephine first because it is young and so is she, and weak teeth need tender flesh, but this beast could feed on the Inquisition for ages." He grinned. The foreign expression made his face terrible, the rictus of a long-dead corpse. He raised his palm and opened a tiny, bright rift. "Come out, Kabahat... I invoke you."

Vivienne's teapot exploded. The heel of tea at the bottom, no longer boiling but hot enough to scald, sprayed the tall, elegant elf and he fell back into his chair.


	4. The Storm Breaks

Vivienne immediately threw a barrier around the spritely little rift. Lances of green light raged and thrashed, clawing against the purple energy she favored, almost literally a tempest in a teapot. A tempest near a teapot, Leliana mused? That made sense, perhaps. It flexed, allowing the energies that Dorian and Merrill mustered to pass through. They were not gifted, like the Inquisitor, but could at least heal this small hurt.

Solas drew deep, ragged breaths, clutched the offended member to his chest. He had the feral look of some wounded beast from a glade in the Emerald Graves that had not seen the sun since it shone on Arlathan. Fiona leaned over him, held out her small, pale hand. "All right, now. Let me see it. I'm a healer, you know. It's not the first thing I was good at, but when you're as old as dirt's grandmother you pick up a few tricks."

He growled, at the back of his throat. Leliana, maybe attuned to such things because of her training or an innate sense for what Varric would call "weird shit" a lifetime spent in its shadow, narrowed her eyes and watched closely. Some shadow of the elder days wandered across his face in an age and instant. Solas once more. He offered his hand to Fiona. She took it in hers, turned it over and again, let her delicate fingers run over the raw, pink flesh. He inhaled sharply. "You're lucky, reasonably. The burns are but second tier. I can heal them with fair ease." She glanced around the room, frayed nerves evident in the luminous green eyes. "We're all rather lucky that our little friend did not pierce the Veil entirely. Small he may be but this is an enclosed space. One of us would have played host to him. The rest could have easily been his minced meat." She did her work. The healing was quick, efficient.

Dorian wiped sweat from his brow. The effort of closing a rift, even one so small, was a feat for the strength of Cormac or Dane. It could remind you, Leliana reflected, of what a gift Trevelyan was. He panted. "At least, we hope, no one might have choked on their own intestines."

Blackwall grunted. It could have been laughter. "Small favors, Tevinter."

"Well..." Merrill clapped her hands together. "That was terribly exciting. Having a demon almost burst through the Veil into the room so that it could tear us all into itty-bitty pieces reminded me so much of Kirkwall that I felt a little bit homesick."

Even Josie, shocked to the soles of her feet as she had been by the whole ordeal and ground nearly into powder by this being's attention, had to smile. She could catch glimmers, beneath the Dalish First's cloudy surface, of a sharp humor that made her well matched to Declan Hawke, an acerbic former ranger from Lothering and Varric's best friend in Thedas. "I'm glad that we could make you feel at home, Merrill... but we're still left with something of a dilemma, aren't we? What are we going to do about the creature? Is it still trapped in Madame Vivienne's barrier?"

"No, damn it all," Dorian said. "We closed dear Solas' little rift--which, my old salt, thank you for opening with such little warning, that was a piece of brilliance rivaled only by the ancient magisters--but our new friend Kabahat slipped back through." A little tremor ran reflexively down the spines of all present at his casual usage of a demon's name. A Tevinter thing? Probably, like a fondness for ham that tasted of despair.

"I'm sorry." Solas flexed his hand until he was satisfied that the fingers were still in proper working order. He nodded his thanks to Fiona. "I'm not sure quite what came over me. There's something primal that can happen when you have a spirit, even a seemingly weak one, strong personalities and a lot of magical talent in a room." He offered a wry, half smile. "Even if I am but a humble hedge mage from somewhere on the edges of the world we have gathered two of Thedas' leading powers," he indicated Vivienne and Fiona, "and a pair of bright young lights, too." These must have been Dorian and Merrill. 

Vivienne, who would have been pleased to receive an increasingly outrageous cadre of compliments from a regiment of pride demons, all but purred. "I would be remiss if I didn't thank you for what you said, Solas darling... but you still didn't answer our dear Ambassador's question. What are we doing to do to keep the spirit from wreaking havoc in our malfunctioning little family unit, here?"

Dorian shook his head. "Vivienne said it's not in her bubble anymore. We don't have any access to it one way or the other, regardless what we want to do."

"I do have some of its energy in there, darling." She curled her lips wickedly. "Little scraps and traces where the Fade's doors snapped shut more quickly on its tail than I'm quite certain he wanted."

Dorian cackled. "You are certainly a treasure, Madam de Fer!"

Merrill looked confused. "I'm not sure it had a tail. I mean, some demons do have tails--desire ones do, yes, I've seen that, though I don't know who desires a tail, except for cats who were a bit slow when Declan's Mabari, Ganon, got loose in Lowtown--but others don't, like rage demons." She tugged one of her braids. "Perhaps that's why they're so enraged? They could be terribly jealous of the desire demons, that they have tails and the rage demons don't, and so it makes them so angry that they run around angry all the time. But that would make them more like envy demons, I suppose." The breath ran out of her in a long huff. "This is probably when Marethari would have said something like, 'hamit, da'len,' and 'this is not really the time to natter on about whether or not rage demons are chasing desire demons' tails.'"

"Hamit, da'len," Solas said, absently.

"This certainly isn't the time to go chasing the tails of desire demons or rage demons--if they had them." Fiona didn't even look at the young Dalish, but a quick glance confirmed the smile gracing her full lips.

Merrill rolled her eyes--a tic so similar to Fiona that it could be almost haunting, especially given their more than passing favor. "My point, and I do have one I think, is that we don't really know anything about the spirit. Proceeding blindly could get us all killed, or worse. I've danced lightly with a demon before, ir abelas bellanari. They are harellan, tricksters without measure, children of the Dread Wolf himself. We must chart a narrow course between the dreadnoughts and the maelstrom, as my old friend Isabela would say... Josephine and all the rest of us must be protected but she cannot be if we charge ahead like fools."

"Wouldn't it be good if we could study the beast, for a little while at least?" Cullen. It was good to have a man, on hand, who thought in the terms of tactics and strategy. "We have the elements of the spirit that Madame de Fer could capture, we have Minaeve and Helisma here in Skyhold, and if there's anything in Thedas that they can't figure out, given enough time, I haven't seen it."

"We'll call it settled, then," Leliana said. "Let us bring our findings to the two lovely ladies so that they can do their research and then chasse l'espirit."


	5. Minaeve and Helisma's Laboratory

They gathered amid the bubbling flasks and smoking braziers in the laboratory one floor above Solas' study in the mage tower. Since there was nothing more fascinating to a coterie of mages than the nature of the Fade's denizens, light or dark, and Josephine's fate of equal interest to Blackwall, Leliana and the Ambassador herself, they waited for the two women to discern something of interesting from the tight bubble of energy that Vivienne and Dorian had brought between them. They handled it with the delicacy of crystal wrought in Caimen Brea. Beads of sweat stood out on their foreheads, glistening against skin colored like olives and smooth mahogany. "Do be careful, darlings." Vivienne assayed a smile. "This is rather precious cargo."

Helisma Derington nodded. Her eerie Tranquil's eyes, made curious by a rich dark color that suggested depths of emotion that could not be present, never left the two mages or what they carried. "I am never anything but careful, Madame de Fer. My life's work is in this laboratory. Furthermore, even if your precious cargo could not make an abomination of me, due to my state, it could easily rend me assunder. As I am attached to my limbs, I shall proceed with utmost caution."

Vivienne grimaced. "I can never tell with some of you people... I'm not sure if you're just redundant at times, or if 'humor' is an emotion or concept or just decision to be perverse."

Minaeve emerged behind Helisma. "Oh, it's the latter, Madame. If you ever doubt with Helisma, here, it's the latter. I've spent enough time around her to know." She offered the Tranquil woman's shoulder a friendly squeeze. They both wore the champagn colored robes, trimmed and dagged with burgundy, that Inquisitor Trevelyan had offered to those who had been made Tranquil, previous to joining the Inquisition, and non-magical researchers into magical matters like Dagna. It was a matter of helping those who had been harmed by the Chantry's abusive policies to feel as useful as possible as anything and to restore their dignity as much as possible.

Dorian sniffed, as close to laughter as he could manage in the situation. "There's something comforting about that. Well, as comforting as I can manage to find anything while I'm holding the traces of a small but rather vicious demon in my fingertips."

The companions watched them retreated into their sanctum and draw closed the curtains around the area where more complicated and sensitive magical experiments were performed on the Maker only knows what remains of creatures that the Inner Circle brought them. Merrill amused herself by letting little sparks of green lightning play along her fingertips, dancing like little wisps along the pads, until Fiona pointed out the sign hung by the curtains. It was a wooden panel, painted white and printed with Helisma's careful lettering:

THERE SHALL BE NO IDLE MAGIC, HORSEPLAY OR TOMFOOLERY IN THE WAITING OR TESTING AREAS. THANK YOU.

Below it, Minaeve had added in her looser script, in red:

THIS MEANS YOU MERRILL. WE KNOW WHO TRIED TO MAKE A PET OF THAT SYLVAN.

Even further below that, on a hastily added scrap of paper, someone had crudely scrawled a little stick figure of an elf with braids and a tatooed face being hammered into the ground by an enraged tree. This was, obviously, the work of a certain mad graffitist that had been terrorizing Skyhold for weeks. No one knew his or her identity, but it was certainly, utterly and in no way Sera.

The afternoon seemed to stretch on forever while the women worked. Wisps of incense and essence, fair and foul, floated through the gaps in their curtain, and once Minaeve poked her head out to take a breath of fresh air after a particularly disgusting whiff of something. Things whirred, clicked and rattled, something bubbled and all were not certain that something either unfathomably tiny or entirely enormous did not explode. Leliana, seeing little better to do and that Josephine had gnawed droplets of blood from the tips of her fingers, produced a shepherd's bound set of pipes and blew a simple, soothing melody from between Amaranthine and Brandel's Reach on them. It was a lullaby in the minocalhian mode, probably played in the southern hills since time immemorial but set down as notes on paper in only the last age.

Dorian surprised them by drumming a complex counterpoint to the soft, lilting tune with his fingers on the desk, in front of him. It was dark and minor, full of cul-de-sacs that no-one but a Tevinter would have been likely to extrapolate from such a sweet sound. He shrugged. "My education wasn't only in necromancy, you know. It's Sehronese--from the islands near the Boeric Ocean. They can't roll over in the morning without being massacred by magisters or indoctrinated to the Qun... no wonder their bloody music is so mournful."

If the altus had surprised them then Blackwall shocked them nearly into a stupor, from his post beside Josephine, by adding his rich baritone to the mixture. He sang:

Maker grant you a lamb, in your night's sweet repose,  
as the daylight is dying, where the fairy stream flows.

Vivienne, for all the professed scorn she bore the Warden, had been born to Rivaini parents in Wycombe, very close to Markham, and her young ears knew lullabies from both nations before she had known the thrill of magic and the pleasures and dangers of the Ostwick Circle. It was not easy to remember, consciously, but Leliana and Dorian's haunting melody brought hazy, heavy words to the front of her mind. She let a husky contralto, the kind that could shake bones and turn men's knees into water, roll forth.

Sleep until day, sweet smiles are now beaming,  
sleep until day in your white cradle lying,  
until the bright sun chases shadows away.  
Sleep until day, until shadows are dying,  
Maker, through the lattice, your sunlight be streaming,  
on baby's sweet face, this mother does pray.

Cullen offered his Chantry trained tenor, bred high and clear for the rocky slopes around Honnleath. It wove through the deeper voices, pierced their richness with its sweet brightness.

Two corbies on the gnarled tree cawing,  
black wolves slinking in this heather--  
Father's silver sword a lying,  
on the mantle, above where wool socks are drying--  
eyelids droop, heavy as stone, soft as a feather,  
and the wee babe's snore softly sawing. 

Merrill joined. Her voice, perhaps mezzo soprano if it could have been judged by formal Orlesian or Tevinter standards at all, was lilting and quavered at the high and low registers.

Seothin, seothulo, adahl'eth atishan  
seothin, seothulo, elgaren dara.  
Marise no chuisle, mi'durgen atisha,  
hamin, da'len, Mamae dar iras'in.

When the music died, Leliana tucked the pipes into a fold in her cloak. "The branches of that one simple tune have spread far from its humble roots on the banks of the River Dane, I see... much farther than I would have suspected."

"Perhaps." Solas let his long fingers, still pink with scar tissue from Fiona's hasty but effective healing, run across his naked scalp. "Or it could be that the roots are deep in the Korcari Wilds and Brecilian Forest and its branches have spread to the Bannorn, River Dane and beyond."

"C'est vrai... you do challenge me, Solas. One day, if I think I can do it justice, I shall compose a bard's tribue to you."

He nodded. "It would be an honor, Mistress Nightingale. What would you call it?"

"'Utheneras,'" perhaps, for your habit of walking in dream... but that would be to easy." She stroked her chin. "'Fen'ghilan' suits me more, or suits you, rather... 'the Wolf that Wanders.'"

Something passed over his lean face. "Wolf?"

She shrugged. "There's something wolfish about you, my friend... and you cannot deny that you have roved further than any of us but our song." A soft snore, like the babe in Cullen's verse, drew her glance to Josephine. Asleep with her head buried in her arms, leaned against Blackwall's strong hip. He had his arm around her. For all the wild disarray of her curls the tableau was one of innocence and sweet dreaming... although Leliana knew that her petit chou's dream's had been anything but sweet, of late. It was, after all, what had drawn them here.

The curtain rustled. Helisma emerged, and then Minaeve. Both seemed haggard, the elf run a little deeper into her rut, but even the beautiful, well-composed Tranquil woman bore dark smudges under her eyes. A ragged clip had been torn out of Minaeve's left ear and the side of her neck was painted crimson, although luckily there had been a poultice in the testing chamber with them, and a clump of her hair was missing. "You brought us quite a piece of work, Madame de Fer and Master Pavus," Minaeve said. "I'm just glad that Merrill didn't put a bow on it and a little shirt embroidered to say 'Mamae's little Fadespawn.'"

"Honestly!" Merrill rolled her eyes. "It's not like I do this every week... or even most of them. It was only just the Sylvan--and it was barely more than a sprout. And the dragonling, but she was only just hatched. And the... oh. I rather see your point. Carry on."

Hoping to head off an argument between her two favorite, squabbling youngters, Fiona spoke up. "What piece of work was it, Minaeve? There shouldn't have been anything but traces of its energy in the bubble. We were careful to not give you anything that could generate any response to you."

"It was subtle, Grand Enchanter," Helisma said, "lying in wait for exactly the opportunity that we presented--careless as we were, have been far too often." Her flat monotone somehow made it worse. "Kabahat lurked in traces of the mist. More than any demon, save one of desire, it is able to worm around the edges of a host's thought, and can probe more deeply into the depths of the soul. All are vulnerable, mage and those without magic alike, and all seem delectable prey."

Dorian had to chuckle. "You paint such a pretty picture, Helisma. Tell me--is there any good news or should I just drown myself in a vat of fine moscato from Vol Dorma?"

"Do not lose hope yet, Master Pavus." If one had not known that Helisma was Tranquil then the slight quaver at the edges of her lips might have seemed like the whisper of a smile. "We were astounded by its cleverness but were not unable to uncover weaknesses. An altus as redoubtable as you should have no trouble exploiting them." That humour, again? Perhaps it was just the faintest twitch upward, right at their full, cherry red corners.

Leliana had no problem at all with slipping her arms around each woman, in turn, and offering both of them a tight embrace. "You have done wonderful and your work is a credit to the Inquisition. Now... let us get down to business and you can tell us how to handle this Kabahat fellow more successfully than we did before."


	6. Guilt and Shame

Cullen snorted. "Using Minaeve and Helisma's information to challenge the creature more successfully... well, we couldn't do a great deal worse than we did last time, I suppose."

"I wouldn't know about that, my moist friend," Dorian said. "We could have been in a place with forks and..."

From the other side of their waiting area, Josephine had awoken from her cat-nap. She didn't look quite as close to absolute collapse, but none of them would have felt terribly comfortable letting the Ambassador present herself to any visiting royalty. She still slumped against Blackwall's strong shoulder, for support emotional or physical, but dark embers burned in the depths of those inky eyes. "Mio Creatore, Altus... if you tell that story, again, I'm going to pluck out your mustache hair by hair. Once was too much."

He leaned over to squeeze her hand, all warm whiskey eyes. "My mustache would seem like a small sacrifice to have you in fine form again, Josie.

She managed a smile. "You Tevinters and your sacrifices..." She sat up straight. "Go ahead with your report, Helisma, Minaeve. Anything that either of you can offer will be appreciated to the utmost." This wasn't the brittle, frighted woman who had spent days, weeks even, the focus of a spirit's concentrated attack. This kestrel of House Montilyet had spread her wings and wheeled in Antiva's twilit sky, now. Out of the Inquisition's entire fortress, in Skyhold, it had chosen her for its prey--an insult. Kabahat would pay honor's debt for that.

"Thank you, Ambassador." Helisma bowed. "We are glad to be able to help you. You were instrumental in negotiating peace between the Inquisition, King Alistair and the Grand Enchanter, and you have always been kind to us all... mage, Templar and Tranquil alike." 

"Now," Minaeve said, "the chief weapon of this creature lies in its flexibility. All men and women are blessed, or cursed, with all of the passions that each of the spirits that become demons possess. An elven scullery-maid in Val Chevin and the Margravine of Ansburg are all subject to the same desires--though they might wear a different cloak--and can be pricked by the same depths of rage. Each could find herself gripped by hunger or despair, or be overcome by pride."

"Forgive me if I'm wrong, sweet Minaeve..." Dorian worked to suppress a smile. "But wouldn't the pride of the Margavine be a lot more about spears and swords and conquest and the elven servant's be more about, er... a particularly well polished bannister?"

Fiona sniffed. "Her rage might become insurmountably towering if it focused an insufferable altus and how handsome his head would look decorating a pike."

Helisma spoke. "Your question is rooted in this world, Dorian, not the Fade. What Minaeve mentioned before, the differing cloaks, are what you see. It does not matter that the pride and desire of the Margravine are grander, by the standards of those who dwell within physical body. To a spirit each would be nourishment to be taken by the standards of the spirit."

"Yes," Minaeve said. "Like bees."

"Oh, for fuck's sake bees." Dorian ran a hand through his hair. "Now you sound like Sera. It must be an elven thing."

Vivienne laid a hand on his arm. "You're being dense, darling, possibly on purpose because you just like teasing Minaeve so much. What they're driving at is this; the spirits of the Fade don't require a great variety of food, only a great quanity of what they are able to eat."

Minaeve nodded. "Precisely. You could lay a great banquet before bees and they would ignore it and still just go forth to the clover patch. A demon of desire is the same way. All the pride in the world doesn't mean anything to it. By the same token any desire is sweet and is to be treasured and cultivated--and more is better."

"Not just more." Solas drew a glyph in the air, of a hungry mouse despising a large, moldy cheese in favor of a smaller, more savory choice. "A man who has boundless desire for or pride in something harmless or meaningless--who wants only to smell the flowers, for example, or who takes pride in his radish patch--is almost useless to a spirit of desire or pride. The same can be said for impotent rage or easily satisfied hunger. It needs the rich complexity of the illcit or unusually resonant, in some way, to be truly satiated, grow in power and, thus, ever hungrier. Those trapped in their thrall would pray for death if they were not so fully ensnared by the objects of their obsessions." 

"You are correct. And a spirit of guilt is even more insidious because it is not universal in the same way that a spirit of hunger or rage might be. It is not the same in Orlais and Tevinter, Ferelden and Antiva, because guilt is not the same there."

He peered sharply at the Tranquil woman. "Intriguing. Please explain your logic, Helisma."

"Some nations, in Thedas as it operates currently, work primarily within the confined notions of individual guilt. A woman commits an for which she is culpable, and the authorities--or one seeking vengeance--can hold her responsible for it. She can be taken and, after a trial has established the extent of the blame due her, imprisoned, executed or otherwise punished for what she has done. It lies on her alone, though, and not on her family or broader group."

"That is how crime and punishment are apportioned in Ferelden, more or less," Cullen said. "When Loghain mac Tir and Rendon Howe were implicated in the sale of elves from the Denerim Alienage into slavery, along with the murder of the Cousland family, the abduction and torture of Osywn of Dragon's Peak and diverse other unpleasantries after Cailan's death ten years ago during the Blight, Brosca and his companions moved to arrest them. If Howe had not been slain, and Loghain press-ganged into the Wardens, both men would have surely lost their heads. The blame lay purely on them, though, and even Oswyn's father Bann Sighard supported a joint rulership of the Warden Alistair and Anora. Though she was Loghain's daughter, no taint of his crimes touched her."

"It is important also that a man bear sole blame for his crimes in Tevinter." Dorian ran a hand through his dark hair, still a little damp from the day's heat and his ordeal with the spirit and its residual energy. "The slaves, soporati and liberati can never rest truly easily if they believe that all might be tarred with the brush of one dissident, and even though a magister might be able to rain down fire from the heavens he is usually bright enough to realize that an angry mob can rend him limb from limb while he is casting the spell, and that he has to sleep at least once in a while." 

"As long as they are careful, so very careful, to drop the hammer of cruel punishment only on those whose guilt has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt--and as long as that punishment is spectacular enough to stick in the memory of even the most dense--the delicate balance of justice can be maintained. Or at least the illusion thereof." He shrugged. "Besides... those of us near the ruling class like to at least pretend to the fiction that magic is the servant of man, not his master... once again, it helps to keep the unwashed masses a little less thirsty for our blood and makes a decent soporific for those magisters and other altae with a conscience."

"That is certainly a little differently than we view matters in Orlais," Leliana said. "In the Game, which is much the whole of our world, well... it is more about whether or not you get caught. You can do anything, no matter how vile, as long as you can plausibly enough deny that you were in the Empire at the time."

"And if you are caught?" Merrill asked.

"Then you work to dance gracefully around the issue and you might escape, my darling," Vivienne said, "no matter how flagrantly you have flouted the rules of civilized society. There is no honor in being a bastard, but there is glory in being a magnificent one."

"If you are dastardly enough, subtle and full cruel in your wickedness, the bards might make a song out of you." Leliana chuckled. "Or the nobles might make an empress."

"By the Maker!" Dorian looked aghast. "I never thought I'd see a society that could shame Tevinter for sheer moral turpitude... my Orlesian friends, you set the fashion for us all once again."

"Yes, quite." Fiona's glare was flat and unfriendly. "That does seem rather like the Orlais I remember. A storm of fireballs might not go awry in clearing the whole place."

"Well, there's not any fireballs in Dalish justice," Merrill said. "Since we're such small societies, each clan being more or less its own little nation, we don't have the luxury of exiling or executing anyone but a real piece of work. Imprisonment? Impossible. I mean, what would be do, lock someone in an aravel and lug them about over the bumpiest roads? I mean surely in the rare instance of someone being dead set on raping or murdering his neighbors we'd set him adrift in the woods, or maybe give him an arrow or two as a parting gift, but reconciliation between parties is the main goal of any Keeper. Even my, you know... eccentricities... you know, with spirits..." Merrill's voice grew very small. "Anyway, even in light of those things that I did that were not the very wisest, well, Keeper Marethari tried to bring me back into line with the clan, at least until I went my journey up Sundermount with Declan and Bethany."

"Antiva is very different from all that," Josephine said. "In my homeland, the sin of any person is the sin of her whole family, and the sin of her family reflects on her. Those committed by her ancestors reflect on her, and the dishonor of her children can be a stain upon her name." She offered a wry smile. "We must sound like such savages, compared to all that you have said, but it is the way we are... it is 'Our Business,' to borrow a term that the old-timers use, sitting as giudici in their black robes, when someone dares to challenge their wisdom. Honor is where we begin and end our lives, more precious than gold."

Blackwall snorted. "I'd say not too savage, compared to the bloody Orlesians, but I woke up with a hell of an aching shoulder this morning based on that honor."

She touched the shoulder in question. "Antivan honor and male ego make a foul pair... do I need to rub liniment on it for you, again?"

He waved her off. "The liniment is almost worse than the ache... what is the stuff, mint balm and dragon bile?"

She rolled her eyes. "Povero bambino." To the assembly. "We do not have law courts like Cullen or Dorian describe in Ferelden or Tevinter, or a Keeper to make us honest like the Dalish, or even the sham courts that Leliana and I know hold sway in Orlais. La Corte D'Onoranza, wherein giudici made up of representatives from the most powerful families in Antiva sit, decides on questions of honor that are brought before it. My father is a member of that court, as is my grandmother, my brother-in-law's father and my sister-in-law's aunt. Who had the right in this matter or pride, who handled themselves with greater fierezza in this petty skirmish, was omerta breached in negotiations regarding trade or diplomacy with an outside party--including this Inquisition."

She drew a deep breath. "The court's decision can make or destroy a family in ways bold or subtle. A known pariah will be rejected for trading partnerships or loans, or they might find loans called in unexpectedly. Mercenari could renegotiate their contracts unfavorably at an inconvenient moment--like with another brigata at the gates of your villa. Worst of all, if Il Affari has been breached sufficiently, the only warning of his infraction that a violator and his family might get could be a Crow's dagger in the night. La Corte D'Onoranza is serious business, amici... it hangs over the head of any good little Antivan girl like the Blade of Aristide."

"My goodness... with all that it's not a wonder you're having this problem." Merrill wiped her brow. "I think that I'd have a marvelous legion of spirits of guilt and shame pursuing me at all times in such a world!"

"It's not so bad," Josephine said. "To be Antivan is... delicate. An intricate dance of shame and pride. We're a complex people."

Blackwall chuckled and nudged her with his shoulder. "I recall you telling me that, once before."

"We tell ourselves that a lot, on the shores of the Rialto Bay and River Tellari. It is one of the few common weapons in the great Antivan war against total madness."

"Helisma," Solas said, "before we go any further... I know that you probably did most of the work with the spirit's active remains, though you and Minaeve surely worked as a unit. Are you quite all right? You feel no ill effects?" He peered closely at her with those murky, disconcerting eyes. Even when trying to appear, or even honestly be, solicitous the man could sometimes make one feel like a butterfly pinned to a insect collector's white-board.

"I am, thank you." She bobbed, a habit surely picked up from Dagna. The Tranquil had an unnerving habit of mimicking almost everything they saw more than once. Minaeve had, in fact, grumbled loudly at one point about helping Helisma to unlearn her Dalish accent. "It is much safer for a Tranquil mage or Dwarf to work with a demon's components, though not... entirely. I do not feel pushed and tugged by passion in the same way that an unaltered person can, but I do understand the intellectual concepts of right and wrong, success and failure, less and more, danger and safety--and the attendant states of guilt, rage, pride, desire and fear. I cannot be possessed but damage can accrue to what passes for my soul." A cloud passed over the serene perfection of her olive face. "When there are great dangers Dagna and I take precautions and make sure that Minaeve and our other assistants are even more careful."

"How fascinating," Cullen said. "I have been around Tranquil mages most of my life and yet know so little about them." He shook his head.

"No wonder, my old salt." Dorian clapped him on the back. "You lads in the South have a terrible habit of swinging the brand around will-ye nil-ye and then forgetting about the person who used to inhabit the hundred and fifty or so pounds of flesh you left walking around. It's an odd affliction, I must say."

Cullen stiffened. "I have made one mage Tranquil in my career, Tevinter--one! He begged me to do it or kill him, and I do not know which would have been ki--"

Solas waved his hand. "Enough. You are making Helisma uncomfortable and we certainly do not want to attract unwanted attention." How he could tell the former none of them could figure out--Solas just had his way of doing things--but the latter was patently obvious after their earlier adventure. "Besides, I may have a way of dealing with our Ambassador's problem. It's going to require a hands on solution, though." He smiled in a way that made everyone as uncomfortable as he avowed the beautiful Tranquil had become. "We're going to have stalk the Fade." He looked around. "May I ask for volunteers?"

Josephine stepped forward. "They are my dreams and my demon. I would not be the Kestrel of Montilyet if I did not go."

Solas nodded. "You could not be less."

Blackwall took her hand. "Where Josie goes do I."

"I understand, though you may not."

"Come again?"

Solas touched his shoulder. "You're welcome to travel with us, champion."

Leliana took her other hand. "It's been almost ten years since I was in the Fade chasing a demon. I wrote an all right song about it, then, but my craft has matured since. I could do better now." She kissed Josie's cheek. "I'll help you too, if there's time, petit pois."

"Excellent... the cards are spread." Solas wove a careful tarot pattern in the air, cards glowing. They revealed the Queen of Swords, the Chariot and the Empress. He crooned softly, letting them flow in a circle. "Let your eyelids grow heavy... let yourself fall into a deep, deep sleep..."


	7. Le Rossignol Chante

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Writing this proved... intense and unpleasant. This was some of the hardest writing I've done to date.

She started awake, slumped at her desk. Skyhold? What? Leliana shook her head. That tantalizing name retreated with the cobwebs, something from a dream, a memory to lace through a song. She wiped long, copper bangs from her eyes and yawned, peered around the study. Maker, what a mess! Her fat lute, carved from a single piece of fawn sylvan wood and strung with true snofleur gut, was propped in the corner and the shepherd's set of pipes she liked for portability lay on a chair nearby. Sheets of paper were scattered all around, covered on both sides edge to edge by words and musical notation in her strong, flowing hand. A candle guttered to nothing on the desk. She checked the ends of her hair, thrown into quick twists the night before, for singes. 

A deep, rumbling chuckle from the doorway caught her breath in her throat. "Ancestors, woman, and Andraste's crispy ass. It's a miracle you didn't burn down this blessed expensive townhome and Val Royeux with it."

She leaned her cheek into her hand. "Ravin Brosca... what a scoundrel you are. The only man I know who can be blasphemous in two faiths at once."

"You didn't run in the same circles I did growing up, Bright Eyes. Old boy I knew named Laska... he could blaspheme both Divines, the Ancestors and the Qun in one breath."

"I was truly deprived among the aristocracy of Orlais, mon beau vilain."

"Damn straight you were, kid. We didn't have much in Dust Town but we had, er... dust. Yeah. I mean, my sister could spit farther and fight harder than any man I know and look at where that got her--she's married to an Ancestors beshitted king, now." Ravin tugged his thick, auburn beard. "Bhelen isn't much of a king, I'll grant you, but at least he can stay awake more than two hours out of twenty-four unlike some Harrowmounts I can name."

Leliana left her desk and moved behind him, slipped her arms around his waist. "Our own Empress Celene is so addicted to Rivaini spice tea that she has a pot of it enchanted to always remain hot and her hands tremble day and night. I'm not sure she's slept more than minutes since she took the throne as a girl of sixteen." 

She was slight and he lanky, for one from Orzammar, so she was almost able to lay her cheek against his--almost. "I love you, Ravin." For all that a child and madwoman lay between them. This was a man for whom she'd written songs, the best of her ouvre, performed them for the crowned heads of Thedas and seen most go on to great popular success, especially in Fereldan and the Free Marches. "Je t'aime, Ravin, vraiment."

The hard muscles of his belly shifted into lithe curves under her hands and his scent changed--not the sweat, leather and oiled metal she associated with a Carta cutter but a swirl of harlot's blush, felicidus aria, savory and thyme. Leliana threw herself away from his interloper, pressed her hands and back against the wall. "You... Maker's breath, what are you doing here?"

Marjolaine smiled sadness and scorn. "Ma petite imbecile... you know as well as I do that you never got to live with Warden Brosca. He got an Old God's bastard on the witch and hared of to Amaranthine while you chased Justinia's fool dream."

"Cynicism does not make you wise, Marjolaine. Any adolescent not yet old enough to have played for her first lordling in the Bannorn hinterlands can sneer and act unimpressed by things."

"But I am unimpressed, sweet Rossingole... as you would be, too, were your straits not so dire." Her large, inky eyes shimmered with amusement, anguish and--Leliana prayed in dungeons deeper than her soul--honest affection. "To forget that the Divine is but a player in the Game, and so is any bard who works for her, reduces the bard to no more than a tool. Seeker Pentaghast might be well satisfied being used like the sword she swings around so freely but I thought you more clever than that, bichou. The Chantry, Andraste, all of it is an illusion, my love--the Game is real." She cupped Leliana's cheek with agonizing softness that landed like a dragonbone morning star. "You let that slip your mind, let yourself grow starry eyed... now you're here." 

She whispered the last into Leliana's parted lips, both their breath coming in jerky gasps, and proffered a quick seal of blessing and damnation on them before pulling away. Leliana furrowed her brow. "What are you talking about, Marjolaine? I'm not in dire straits, save you always manage to give me grief. I'm in my home--my own study. My lute is in the corner. Schmooples is snuffling around somewhere." 

"Cast a look around yourself, my beloved."

Leliana did, in spite of herself. She found her cell in Harwen Raleigh's dungeon, pieces of Tug piled carelessly on his cot in the corner beneath a soaked, crimson sheet and her wrists nailed to the splintery board above her head. She hung limply. Blood ran down her forearms, pooled in the crooks of her elbows, in the grooves where her neck met her shoulders, and made the ragged remnants of her fine, cerulean blouse cling to each curve of her torso. It stained her hair a deeper red, painted her face like a mabari's kaddis and dripped down her bare legs and off her toes to join an ever growing puddle on the floor. Her fingers, too slippery to aid in any escape attempt anyway, trembled, tingled and grew numb by turns. 

Her entire body ached--back, hips, neck, shoulders most of all, the livid bruises where boots and mail gauntlets had been enthusiastically introduced to tender flesh. Marks of knife, whip and brand burned, as did the salt used the clean them--an Orlesian spy was too valuable to let go septic and die. 

"Don't you see, Rossingol? This is what happens when you deny the importance of the Game, sweetling." She siezed the slick strands of Leliana's hair with her fine-boned, surprisingly strong musician's hand, fingers that were used to fretting fractious strings for hours showing no issue at all with grip. "Look at what you've wrought."

The sheet on Tug's cot writhed and his hands peeled it back with exaggerated, excrutiating slowness. His head wriggled free, recognizable only for the drooping, braided mustache. Raw ruin gaped where eyes, dancing blue like Leliana's own, and a proud nose had been. His swollen, purple lips struggled to form words. "Sketch? Where's Sketch? Did he make it? They were going to take his hands... you can't let them. It's what the Templars used to say, back in the Circle. To make him behave. He's more scared of it than anything. Sketch..."

"Hush, Tug..." Leliana tried to say it. Her bladder burned at the bottom of her belly and ice water gushed in her veins. She couldn't do much more than whisper, gurgle and moan. Her lips were cracked, tongue felt too large for her mouth. The words came from somewhere. "Sketch is down the hall... he'll be okay, mon couer." She sagged, let her head hang against her breast. He would be, wouldn't he? Would she?

Marjolaine pressed close to her, spoke into her mouth again, into her soul. "He will, Rossingol, if you'll but confess to me." She wore, for reasons Leliana could not fathom, the Divine's sumptuous, ceremonial robes in gold and scarlet. Her form shifted, wine dark curls now a shining sheaf of wheat, midnight eyes instead glimmering ophidian. "Sing your sins, belle oiseau." Their lips met so hard that their teeth clashed. Her tongue forced its way into Leliana's mouth. The kiss sweltered for a long moment and, in spite of her agony, heat spread deep in her groin.

Leliana turned her head away, into the wet, rusty stench where her neck met her shoulder. "Divine Justinia... Revered Mother... Dorothea... no. Please..." She shuddered. "Don't do this to me. I beg you."

"Then confess, Rossingol--confess it all to Mother Dorothea. Let it all spill out--hurry, before Harwen returns. He's coming, you know. He's going to mangle your fingers, one by one, just like he said, so you can't play your lute, and cut out your lying tongue before he gives you to his soldiers for a copper apiece."

"I can't play my lute anyway," Leliana murmured. She found a shard of spirit somewhere, buried deep. "He smashed it over my head."

"That's the least of your worries, petite salope... wait until he peels the flesh from your pretty skull like a grape and leaves you bare and shrieking for the maggots." She slid her tongue around the bloody curve of Leliana's ear. Her hand dipped low, between her legs. Leliana squirmed. "Won't you confess to me, Rossingole? Confess to mother."

"You're not even making any sense! What do you want me to confess to?"

"To all of it, you little fool. You lead Tug to his death, cost Sketch the one he loved and almost let the Empire fall back into war with Ferelden--your two homelands at each other's throats again. And how many more lives would the Blight have cost then?" She chuckled and nuzzled at Leliana's throat. It was an intimate, obscene gesture. "You've done so much. You drew the Warden astray with your delusions, let him fall in love with you, and begrudge him even caring about his own son. You let the madness go unabated in Kirkwall, as good as murdering Elthina and so many other good people. You didn't secure the Temple of Sacred Ashes..." Dorothea's face twisted. "You let Corypheus kill me, you stupid bitch. You killed me."

"No." 

"Yes! Now confess it and be done before Harwen returns with his flensing knives. Your death can be quick; I can be so merciful."

Leliana squeezed her eyes shut, grit her teeth and summoned the real face of Revered Mother Dorothea, the face of her own beloved mother Oisine and first mentor Lady Cecilie. She saw Ravin's cockeyed grin, Wynne's gentle smile, Ogrhen's drunken leer and even Morrigan's sneer. It was this last, as much as anything perhaps, that teased her into action. "You are not Revered Mother Dorothea. This isn't Harwen Rahleigh's cell. You're Kabahat. This is the Fade, and I have nothing to feel guilty about. I'm not perfect, and I have done so much wrong in my life, but I have done my best to make amends for it."

Everything changed. She found herself in dragon wing armor and boots, a cloak of deep indigo vyrantium samite wrapped around her shoulders and Far Song in her fist. It felt good--the only bow she'd ever known more responsive, alive and deadly than Marjolaine's famous dragonthorn recurve. Rahleigh's dungeon melted away and this field in the Fade seemed a meadow, like the one near Lady Cecilie's estate when she was a girl.

The... creature... dwindled in front of her. It did not really wear the smile lines around Dorothea's kind, beloved green eyes. She did not perceive Ravin's rock hard shoulders, the ones she had gripped while they heaved above her in his tent, in the camp outside Redcliffe, that first night they'd scandalized Wynne, infuriated Morrigan and tantalized Alistair with noisy lovemaking. Even Marjolaine, those whorls of dark, complex beauty deep enough in her past to be smudged, didn't register anymore. It lurched towards her, left ragged strips of cloth and flesh on the floor, burbled sacrilege, blood and bile against the Maker and all gods good or ill.

Leliana drew an arrow's fletching to her cheek, let the mighty bow rest and loosed its tension. The barbed head buried itself between the scrabbling horror's eyes with a sickening crunch. It sighed to a halt and burned away. Somewhere, in the meadow's far corner, a wolf's howl called her. She slung the bow in the in the silver clasped frog on her new baldric's right shoulder--neat how your dreaming soul you could do that, she supposed, and as handy as the filigreed quiver it had laid on her left hip--and turned to follow. There was a spreading vhenadahl in her sight now, the kind you might lay under and compose for hours, and getting to it seemed like the most important thing on life or beyond.


	8. Blood Rains on the Snow

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another hard to write chapter... I seem to have developed a penchant for those. Inspired heavily by Simon R. Green's "Down Among the Dead Men." Anyone who likes dark fantasy/horror should give it a read.

Raubichard clapped and rubbed her gloved hands. "They will be coming over the hill soon, Captain, yes? Around the bend? I grow tired of waiting. It's high time for some excitement."

Thom Ranier snorted at his youngest recruit. "Only slightly less than half of all of being a soldier is waiting, Ro. The other two or three minutes usually feel more like soul bending terror than a thrill."

"I did not think it would be a thrill, messere, no exactly, but, well..."

"But you thought it would be a thrill?"

She hung her head. "I thought it would not be milking goats."

Mornay, his lieutenant, barked with laughter that seemed entirely too loud for a roadside ambush, especially during winter in Emprise du Leon, where any whisper could carry miles. "She's got you there, Tommy, she really does. If there's one thing that soldiering's as sure as hell not like it's milking goats."

Crimson crept up Ro's neck, to her cheeks. Ranier scowled at his lanky second-in-command. "Try to avoid killing morale totally, Mor, and pass me a flask of something before I freeze my bloody balls off." This was a bad place to travel in a frigid place. He'd even suggested to Ser Robert, only half in jest, that they let Emprise's icy roads take care of Callier and his brats. The barrel chested chevalier, growling as ever behind his leonine mask, rejoined that swords were always colder than ice. He could not disagree.

Ermine, a slender, tough sword and dagger elf who'd taken up paid fighting to escape the Churneau Alienage, chattered and hugged himself close. "I think mine are already frozen off. I might have left them back in Sarhnia; I haven't felt them since then at any rate."

The brandy blossomed in Ranier's stomach, through his weary limbs and aching veins. He passed it to Ermine. "Here... take a slug of this. I feel like I know far too much about your balls, right now."

His swallow seemed too long to be entirely proper, but Ranier didn't say anything. "Oh, thank the Maker. The Creators. Some-damn-body. That's better. I don't feel quite like I'm about to die. Damn and blast but it's cold here in Emprise." He shivered and sipped again, before passing the flask to Ro. "Any of you thugs know why?"

Mornay scratched his stubbly chin. "I had a primal mage attached to Ser Adelaide's regiment, really deep into ice magic, try to explain it to me one night after I had been really deep into her. Something about wind going up one side of the mountains, and getting cold, and then getting warm when it goes down the other side, but here in Emprise it gets stuck. Soon she saw I wasn't understanding fuck all so she just said, 'it's magic, Mor, now roll over on me again,' so I did." He grinned, showing gaps in yellow teeth. "First time she'd made sense in what seemed like hours."

"It's always magic," Ermine said. "Magic, or mages, or Templars, or dragons, spirits, demons... some arse-piss of the nature." He yawned. "I leave it for my betters to sort out. Gaspard, Celene, Ser Robert, even Captain Tommy. Whoever's not me."

"What about Briala? Isn't she the queen of you knife-ears or some shit?"

Ermine made a fork of his fingers and spat between them. "And that's what I think of her. Bitch got a hell of a lot of elves killed all over the Empire cause she was too hot giving the Empress all those Orzammar kisses."

Ro's huge, brown eyes grew even wider in confusion. "Orzammar kisses, Ermine?"

Ranier threw her a wink. "Like an Orlesian kiss, Ro, but down below." They laughed lewdly, even Ro when she figured out the old campaigning joke. "Don't be too hard on Briala, though, or Celene. They were both caught in a bad place--still are. This world's cruel enough without falling in love with someone you shouldn't."

Mornay rolled his eyes and clapped his captain on the shoulder. "The undying wisdom of Thom Ranier, ladies and gentlemen. We should all be writing this stuff down; we wouldn't want to miss a word."

Ermine, rubbing his hands together against the cold once again, said, "It's why I, personally, don't fall in love for more than an hour or ten copper pennies. Thank the Maker for good hearted camp followers who don't haggle too sharply."

Mornay squeezed his eyes shut against an inappropriate scream of laughter, just in case Callier's carriage was nearby. "The... the... wisdom of Ermine, too, I guess. Yeah. Sage shit, old buddy. Sage shit."

Ro shaded her eyes against the bright winter sun, glaring off the snowy road. "This is a pretty elaborate ambush. What is Callier carrying?"

Ranier knew... he remembered the moment that Ser Robert had told him. The deep, implacable growl, behind the red lion mask, crawling forth alive with an ambition and hatred that had taken him aback. "I can't say, Ro. I just know that it's imperative that we stop him from reaching Halamshiral. Who knows the mischief he might get up to there."

"It might be important papers, like secret plans to promote an uprising in Chalons, or a map of the stronghold's weaknesses, or a detailed itenerary of Duke Gaspard's campaign strategy, or, or..."

"Or a location of the boils on his bottom," Ermine said, "or all of the foods that will make him gag and shout at the kitchen staff, or colors of shirt that will cause him to look particularly terrible by candlelight."

Ro narrowed her eyes at him. "You don't have to be such a bastard about it, Ermine."

"I never did manage to meet my father, Ro my sweetling. What else could I be?"

Ranier waved his hand. "Enough, enough. Your bickering will wake the neighbors. De Solvay's rangers have laid enough hints for Callier's rig to take this particular road. He and Ser Robert will be be crosser with us than we can stand if they get spooked and divert around us."

That shut them up--miracle anything could--and just in time, apprently. Callier's squat, slow coach--carved from luxurious, bright silvered ash for comfort and etched with the silly ocher jug woven through with viridian vhenadahl branches that all his damn fool family, down in the Dales, had taken as their sigil--wobbled into sight. Everything was colored like mud, red or green, from transom to hoop stick, futchells to footman's livery. The gilt around each edge, added certainly to lend the contraption grandeur, gleamed in the mid-morning sun. The glare must have blinded the driver and created an effect more ludicrous than awe inspiring.

It clattered over the bumpy, uncomfortable back roads between the Dales and Halamshiral. The Imperial Highway would have been safe, serene, far too well-guarded a place to attack one of Celene's favorite sycophants. De Solvay's men had done their dirty work well. The rangy, sallow squire from north of the Nahashin Marshes and his crew left the same foul taste in Ranier's mouth that they always did. They were more hotlands savage than Orlesian, he told himself. You couldn't trust them with anything.

So... that left him asking... what's your excuse, Thom? What lead you to this barbarity? That taste in his mouth might have been of his own making. Ranier didn't like it, washed it out with another swallow of good, Sahrnia brandy. "All right, children," he said, "weapons ready. Let's earn our coppers and crowns so we can go and drink them down."

Each of them shouldered an arbalest, huge weapons with more than fourteen stone draw weight, and knew that other pockets of Ranier's men secreted around the road had done the same. They waited for the coach to draw so near that its light, wooden walls would crumble like paper under the bolts, waited for Ranier's signal with their fingers on their trigger guards...

Two matches pairs of matched, dunskin Free Marches Rangers with sooty stockings fell first, amid screams, slashing hooves and high jets of blood. The carriage shrieked to a halt. The driver pitched over his slain team, to a sure broken neck, and the footman beside him toppled as soon as his chest and shoulder sprouted three great, dark bolts.

Each team kept up the assault, as fast as they could reload, in cascading fashion so that there was never an instant's surcease. That had been one of Ranier's innovations in combat, so that crossbowmen could cover each other with fewer pikemen mixed among them, and had earned him a captaincy. Maybe this... well, men had earned chevalier's plumes for fouler deeds, no?

He signaled an end to the rain of death. The carriage, so ostentatious less than five minutes before, disclosed light on all sides. Ro's face could barely be seen against the snow. "By the Maker," she kept murmuring, "by the Maker... what a slaughter..." 

She was so young, not more than nineteen. Maybe milking goats didn't seem so bad now. Ranier clapped her shoulder. "Take heart, lass. We're just doing our job, right? Let's go and make sure of things."

She gulped, nodeed, and laid her arbalest on the general pile. They crept forward. The running footman, who'd fallen in the churned mud with a single bolt through his right shoulder, crawled towards them. Blood soaked the entire side of his body, pooled under him and left great smears in the snow. He moaned, half incoherent, and tugged at the cuff of Ermine's trousers. "Help me, serah... s'il vous plait. I'm... we... embuscade!"

Ermine grimaced and look between each of his companions. There was neither potion nor healer between them. He drew his dagger and knelt beside the man. "Shhh, mon jeune. We're here to help, I'm here to help. Shhh..." He maintained the quiet, comforting noises while he drew his blade across the footman's throat. Ermine shuddered. "Don't like doing that."

Mornay shrugged. "It was a mercy, though." Ro had grown even paler. If her skin lost any more color, Ranier mused, it would become as transparent as the spun glass he'd once seen in Val Royeaux. "I wonder what all this carnage was for. Do we dare look inside?"

"We must," Ranier said. "We were given a job; we've got to finish it. I'll look."

He did, but there wasn't any keeping them away. They'd come this far, after all. The blood was on their hands, too, and wasn't coming out any time soon. Callier himself, two children of about eight and ten years and a woman were pinioned to their saturated, dripping seats by more than a dozen cruel, steel bolts. It was an ugly thing, but this was war and any pretense to civility was no more than a lie. Ranier prayed, for the sake of them all, that it had been quick.

Ro's hands flew to her mouth. "By the Maker! Sweet Andraste guide me, I'll never be forgiven, I'll never forgive myself... their shades are going to haunt me through eternity..." She sat in the snow and began to rock, softly chanting the Canticle of Threnodies to herself over and again.

Ermine ran a hand through his thinning hair. "Fucking hell... you shems don't kill enough of our children, you've had to branch out into your own." He laughed, edging on hysteria. "I'm impressed."

Mornay, not as lost to all the world as Ro nor as well composed as Ermine, seized Ranier by the shoulders. "Tommy... this is not the kind of thing you should have left us out of the loop on... left me out of the loop on. What the fuck were you thinking, man? Even in war... what do you think we are, a band of fucking hurlocks? They're going to hang us for this, Thom!" Ro left off her chant and began to weep, her wracking sobs an elegy for the lost innocents. Other groups from Ranier's company began creeping forward, confused and intrigued by the commotion.

Ranier heard none of it. He couldn't tear his eyes away from the woman's face. The skin on her face, what had not been reduced to a red, pulpy ruin by ten inches of steel, was olive and the eye that was not shot through had been part of a huge, inky pair with the kind of sooty lashes that could reduce a man to helpless thralldom in a single batting. Her curls, had they not been limp with blood, would have been a wonder to run your fingers through. An Antivan, then, far from home with her husband and young family; a shame that it had come to this end for them all.

It struck him all at once. He knew this woman, somewhere in the depths of his soul. He wasn't Thom Ranier... not properly, not anymore. This was Josephine Montilyet, he was Gordon Blackwall and these were their children that he'd just killed. The Fade shifted around him.

Emprise was gone. The Western Approach's scorching sand blew around the ruined carriage, into his eyes. That's why the tears stood there... it had to be that, yes, it had to be. Blackwall backed away, looked around for his men, from the old days. Ro hung high from an invisible gallows. Her face, still unlined and plump, was grotesquely swollen, purple with trapped blood. The eyes, so large and dark like the Antivan woman's, lay almost on her cheeks and her tongue lolled fat to one side. Deep gogues showed at the throat, where she'd clawed at the hemp biting deep into soft flesh. Not even a quick breaking of the neck, poor kid. She'd strangled, fighting for air.

Ermine, below her dangling, slowly swaying toes, lay in a pile of tattered, gory rags. One hand lay aside, fingers wrapped limply around the his dagger hilt. The once furious duelist might have made some show of defending himself but... what could one man do against a score? After what he'd seen, what he'd done, why would Ermine even want to try? Ser Balian Penrose of Mont-de-Glace and his militia, it seemed, had not found it prudent to even waste time arresting and trying a knife-ear mercenary before cutting him down; there was bigger game to hunt, the alpha wyvern Thom Ranier. His chief lieutenant, Mornay, had melted into dust on the Gamordan Peaks' stormy wind.

The Antivan, the woman he knew but could not, rose from the bench seat where she'd died. Half her head tore away from the bolt, leaving a collection of long, black curls, a dark stain and gobbets of brain matter in its vicinity as testament to her passing. The smallest child that he'd not seen, a girl of about four that she'd been holding to shield from the onslaught, would have toppled if not for the steel pinioning her to the wooden door. "You," the Josie thing managed to gurgle, "you did this to me. I'd ask why, Thom, but it's just what men like you do, isn't it? It's what happens in war."

He winced at his own, internal justification flooding back. He fell to his knees. "I'm sorry... I'm sorry."

"Are you? Were you when it wasn't me? When it was just Vincent and Josette Callier, and their children?"

"Yes, by the Maker yes. Robert Chapuis... Ser Robert, the monster..." He buried his face in his hands.

She seized his wrists, forced his hands down. Her nails dug into his skin, drew crimson that ran slippery down his hairy forearms. "Not the only monster, Thom. Look at me; look what you did full in it's ugly face. Drink me in." Her single, caligunous eye proceeded in its scorching march through his soul.

"I know that I'm a fucking monster, I've never made any bones about it... everything I do is to make up for it. I never will. I can't."

"Precisely... you slave away for the greater good, and you leave me those silly little flowers. Don't you know, Thom, that a spirit of kindness and beauty like me could never love something like you?"

"I remind myself of it every day... but I'm happy just to walk in your light, Josie, if you'll let me."

"That's right, that's right, you know it," she crooned, drifting closer to him. Their lips were close enough to touch. All the scents he associated with her wafted into Blackwall's nostrils--cinnamon, nutmeg, touch of clove, the embrium she wore in her hair and now, here, the myyrh that Nevarran mortalitasi used to embalm their mummified dead before entombment. "Kiss me, Thom, and begin to make it right. Repent. Seal your atonement with a kiss..." 

Ro, up above, and Ermine below her began to moan along with her. "A kiss! A kiss! To make it right, atone to us. A kiss!" 

"No." He struggled, against unwilling thighs, to stand. "I need to help you, to help the real you, the real Josie." He shook his head. "You're in trouble. No, she is. Josie. Josephine Cherette Montilyet. That's why I'm here. You're not her. You're..." He groped for the word. "Kabahat." His lip curled back. "The bloody demon. And here I stand, jawing with you like old friends. Always was a damn fool, that's what my father said. He was right."

The Fade shifted again. It reorganized itself to leave him in a superior suit of battlemaster's armor, forged from volcanic aurum, and a plumed, masked chevalier's helm. The creature wailed and launched herself at him, her nails now hooked claws. A feral snarl marred the remnants of her lips. Blackwall dropped back a step and caught her rush on his shield, the legendary Path to Glory. The talons howled against its mirrored surface. He threw the beast back, squeezed his eyes shut, and ran her through. 

One swift kick dumped her off the lip of the Abyssal Rift, which now gaped impossibly in front of him. Ah, well... this was, after all, the Fade. Zazikel, Master of the Second Blight, waited below to catch it in his burning jaws. Streamers of amaranthine flame marked her passing, and a horde of darkspawn writhed orgiastically in welcome. He could make out all their foul types and Broodmothers, too. Ro and Ermine, now a hurlock and shriek, toppled and rolled to join their brethren. 

It might have been where he was meant for, too, Blackwall reflected, but he had places to go and oaths he dare not break. Those unyielding, amber eyes in the Abyss would have to wait for him. He knew they would; they were ageless, undying, patient.

The Fade shifted around him, again. A meadow, this time. Maybe the hinterlands around Redcliffe or Crestwood, maybe a meadow by Markham? It could have been near Skyhold in summer. He smiled. The armor was heavy but handsome and fit well--it wouldn't chafe, thank the Maker. The sword and shield might have been the finest he'd ever borne in a long, violent career. The rest of this journey might not be too awful, Blackwall thought. Somewhere, far off, a wolf howled. He let his gaze follow, to a far off vhenadahl, and then his feet


	9. The Kestrel Spreads Her Wings

Josie padded through darkened hallways. She could not tell if they were the back passages of the Winter Palace at Halamshiral, where quiet elven servants crept and young, foolish lovers trysted, or the imposing upper floors of the Corte d'Onoranza in Bastion. Elaborate, carven lions and sunbursts, lit by some enchantment to provide illumination even in the dead of night, suggested the first. Towering marble columns and a nigh frozen marble floor, decorated after the black and white pattern of a Tevinter chessboard, suggested the latter.

She was in the Fade, then, where she walked with other dreamers who had come to help her fight against Kabahat. Halamshiral or Bastion? Both were linked intimately, in her mind, with feelings of intense guilt, anxiety, shame. No Antivan could bear to be called before the honor court. The giudici did not dispatch their black and white striped couriers with summons lightly, so when one arrived at the steps of villa or palazzo an unfavorable verdict was all but assured. The squat edifice itself, near cloked in shadow as the Crow's humbler headquarters in Antiva City, worked towards making even the greatest scions of her nation feel small and insignificant against Nostra Affari, the ironclad set of rules by which all Antivans lived.

Halamshiral though... the Valmont's opulent Winter Palace did not strive toward oppressing those who might have held delusions of their importance, but managed through simple, self-evident ostentation. Even through the haze of dreaming Josephine maintained enough wry humor to wonder that the two most awe inspiring, thrilling structures she'd ever known--even if she barely remembered the court from early childhood, visiting her grandmother--were also the most terrifying. Was she truly that ambitious, in the deep places?

Of course I am, Josie thought. I am Antivan, and what's more the golden kestrel flying on a midnight sky. Were I less... nothing more needed saying. Something itched around her eyes. Her searching fingers found the long late Arvaud fennec's fur. Josie drew a deep breath. So, it was to be Celene's Satinalia ball, again, or a shattered mirror's reflection of it. That made sense, she supposed. Matters began here, so should they end.

Mirabeau Eliade slipped from behind a pillar. "So should they, petite. How, then, shall we attend to matters? You broke my neck, all those years ago, so..." He flexed his long fingers--she remembered how strong they could wind in her hair, when they shared kisses in the night blooming cereus beneath Lady Vaudre's trellis garden. Loud cracks sounded in the empty hallway. "Your throat is so slender, douce crecerelle. This should not take more than a moment."

"No."

"What? You think it too easy for you?" She saw teeth sharper than even dusty memory could make possible glimmer beneath the silver furred snowy cat's mask. "I thought the poetic justice would be more than sufficient for you, Josie, but if you think that the weight of time has made you deserving of something more..." His tongue lapped his upper lip. "You were always a most creative playmate."

"No, I said." The strength of her voice in the darkness surprised Josephine; this was where you always broke to pieces, in a nightmare, wasn't it? Not this time. She fought the longing to call him Mir, the pet-name she'd whispered in his ear at urgent moments, lest Lady Vaudre's bowmen catch them at their dalliance and send him home soundly drubbed. It wasn't Mir, afterall. Kabahat. That hateful name, the invader in her soul, spread like venom. "You are nothing to me, demon, and you are not him. Nor would it matter if you were." She snorted. "He drew a knife on me, for the Maker's sake, for no more than tugging at his sleeve. A crescent slicer!"

"And yet here you stand alive, where I am a walking corpse." He twisted to look the part, lithe hands withered but still, she could imaging, awfully strong. The generous lips lost their lustre and drew away from rotting, brown teeth. His sable robe, that of an Antivan giudice, dulled and grew ragged. "If I, a man young and strong, meant to kill you then how did you escape?"

"Tight quarters and mutual inexperience, it could have been." She shrugged. "Luck is more likely; it has kept many a fool greater than me alive for longer." She walked to him, searching her memory more closely. "The nearer I draw to you, the more clearly I see the ugliness that my shame over your death clouded. Truly, truly I was blind."

"Yes," he hissed, "come to me. Come and let us make amends..." This wheedling tone was far different than its authoritarian timbre earlier on. "We can be friends again, Josie. I didn't really mean to. The trellis awaits us... don't you feel awful over what happened? I know I do..." Shadows flickered in the corners of her eyes, between the columns, each one a shard of regret, a conversation unfinished, question unanswered, song unheard or love unrequited.

"No," she said. "No, I truly do not feel awful. I mourn that he died, I do, and I mourn the man he could have become, but I also know now he could have as easily been a force for evil in the world--would just have likely as been." She walked up to him, full into the grotesque ruin of his face. "I know what Blackwall has told me is true, what Cassandra and Leliana have told me for years. Mir would have gutted me and left me to die in that stairwell. I am no great leader guided by destiny, like Lord Trevelyan, nor a great warrior like Cassandra nor enchanter like Madame de Fer. I am only a simple woman who does the best she can, with the talents the Maker gave her, to leave Thedas a better place than she found it. I do not believe I could say the same of Mir." Josephine balled her fists and looked directly into the empty, rotted holes where eyes had been. "The world is a better place with me in it than Mirabeau Eliade."

Mir's shade, revealed in the trappings of an arcane horror, rose to its full height and shrieked. Its voice sent a spike of ice running into the depths of Josephine's stomach, left maggots crawling in her heart. Things better left unsaid whispered from the depths of its hood, intimations of depravity unknown through all Thedas and beyond. "I said that it could be over in a moment, if you but came to me. Now I come to you and take what's mine. Little birdie's all alone..." Its laugh, beatles burrowing dead flesh, resounded in the endless chamber. The tingle of gathering magic filled the air. All vestiges of Mir were gone; Kabahat's justice reigned supreme in this court.

"The hell she is." Blackwall thrust the Path to Glory in front of Josie, caught winter's blast on it. She couldn't help but smile at the flakes of ice forming in his dark, coarse beard. It seemed so incongruously delicate against his gleaming suit of volcanic aurum plate and the snarling mabari mask he wore over the upper half of his face. He nodded back to her. "Glad to see you're well, my lady."

"As can be expected, I suppose."

The arcane horror reared, preparing to encase them in a ferocious cone of cold, but sprouted three feathered shafts and shimmered in its robes instead. "Come now, bouchinette, what more could you want? We have excitement, intrigue and you are among friends. Let us not complain that we meet again before a horror of the Fade, only celebrate that we meet." Leliana, her exquisite face hidden by a mask wrought of scarlet and cerulean dyed nightingale feathers, nocked another arrow and stepped shoulder to shoulder with them. 

Blackwall warded off another lashing storm of icicles and frigid air. "You've got a strange notion of a good time to celebrate." He raised a horn, a silver banded dragon spine and not the simple druffalo horn he usually carried, and let his challenge sound. Mir's shade shrieked its rage and drifted forward, raked its claws against the Path to Glory, Blackwall's breast-plate and gorget and caught his sword on the shoulder for its trouble. "I'm gladder than I can say to meet you pair again but this chap's not one I'd have invited to the reunion."

Leliana circled away to sting the creature with another well-timed shot. "It is as Lady Cecilie told me once, long ago... Leliana, she said, a good party must not be spoiled by one foul guest, for in Orlais all of them shall be foul and still it must be fair."

Josephine, rusty but game, produced the Pelerine Slip-Knife from her bodice and Shadow's Claw her boot. Taking them in a mixed grip, she dropped low and mirrored her old friend's trajectory. "I would be a poor guest if I did not consent to dance, then, amici." She grinned. "Thank you for joining me. Kabahat throws an awful fete, all alone."

Leliana's eyes sparkled at the Slip-Knife. "The dagger I nailed your underthings to the Chantry board with! I knew that was a special evening."

"Special, yes... and drafty."

Kabahat swung on Josie, enraged at its intended prey's teasing, and engaged her with its claws. Her allusion to joining the dance had not been idle. She turned on her heels, spun on her toes and gracefully wove a dragonbone and red steel net in front of the arcane horror. The deep midnight and bright gold of her skirts flared and flashed. It became apparent to all that the hours spent by Antivan ladies at their coranto practice were neither in vain nor just for show at diplomatic fetes.

A whirlwind of clever attacks and ripostes filled the chamber with a sound of clashing short blades. Josie's twin fangs unleashed an unforgiving chain against the horror. It hovered and dove, stymied by the furious flurry of silk and metal. Her dual weapon finesse, honed in the finest salles des armes and salons in Antiva City and Rialto, kept sharp by a daily ritual of moving through the forms of Rivaini dagger dueling as taught to her by Lady Vaudre, was not to be taken lightly by even the most dangerous enemy.

Fury and grace couldn't keep her in the game long, though. She had not practiced seriously in years, after all, nor ever fought in earnest. It began, inexorably, to drive her back, claws whipping around her daggers, towards her face, neck and the arteries therein. A path of ice sprang up under the horror's robes, slippery little knives to trip Josie and cut her feet. Beads of sweat glistened against the olive skin at the hollow of her throat. The delicate interplay of advance and retreat came close to a rout. 

It pressed her to a column, moved in close and then drew up short at the crippling shot pinning its robes to the ground. Leliana sighed relief. "That took a while for me to line up with you two thrashing around so."

Josie sheathed Shadow's Claw. Her fingers flew to her collarbone and came away sticky with blood. The arcane horror's claws had torn flesh and silk. Ugly as the four furrows on her breast glowered they seemed superficial and, as all this, but a dream. "My apologies, sweet Nightingale. If you'd wanted a dance you had but to ask. I would have gladly let you cut in." She giggled a trifle hysterically. "It looks like our companion tried anyway, at that."

Blackwall, ever the Warden of few words, charged the immobile horror's blind side with the Path to Glory. They went down in a heap, Blackwall's legs tangled in the creature's robes, and these tore away to reveal a pile of pale, molded bones, scurrying black beatles and writhing maggots. The Warden stood slowly, creaking, his gleaming armor stained with filth that might not ever break clean. Kabahat mewled and crawled weakly, his bony fingers scrabbling over smooth marble. A pitiable thing, just a bare skull with a few wisps of Mirabeau's rich auburn hair, skinny arms dragging a ribcage. "The honors are yours, Ambassador, if you'll take them."

Josephine stepped forward, countenance grave. She clutched the Pelerine Slip-Knife tightly in an ice-pick grip. "I take no pleasure in this, in violence. I never have. I never will. This is for the true meaning of Antivan honor, my friends who've stood by me through all the hells and most of all for myself. I do not deserve what you have done, nor what he tried to do so long ago." She let her magnificent, dark eyes slip shut. "Andraste guide my hand."

She drove the Pelerine Slip-Knife through Kabahat's skull. He bucked against the floor, squealed in agony and began to burn. It left a cloud of purple, acrid smoke and dark stains on the floor. All around them the Fade shifted. In the distance, but so, so close, a wolf howled.


	10. Guilt and Compassion

The dreamers returned to Minaeve and Helisma's laboratory in the midst of pandemonium. They had not left the Fade altogether alone and, shrieking in the midst of a rift, Kabahat struggled through the Veil and flopped to the floor. It rose, in the confusion, to its full height--between that of an elf and human--and flexed long, hooked talons. The guise of an arcane horror that Josephine, Leliana and Blackwall faced together was gone, perhaps a Fade dream of the demon itself. In an open field, with time to prepare, a collection of magical minds like the ones present would have faced no problem bringing such a being to heel.

These were tight quarters. Though it brought no more power than a lesser shade things could go incredibly wrong in a room like this. No one among them favored casting the first spell for fear of blasting a friend to oblivion. Fiona, bold as she'd been her whole life, darted forward to strike Kabahat with the charged tip of her Grand Enchanter's staff. It wheeled and struck backhanded. She flew, crashed against a bookcase and slumped to the floor in a pile of eldritch lore. Merrill and Minaeve hurried to her side. Cullen shook his head. It had been a foolish move by the Grand Enchanter; those claws could have laid her open from shoulder to hip.

Blackwall did suffer injury when Kabahat rounded on Josie. He stepped between them, under the demon's swipe and, wielding a chair as his greatsword, broke the momentum of its charge. He caught much of its fury against his chest and already injured shoulder and fell across the woman he'd leaped forward to protect. Blood poured on both of them when he wrapped his arms around her, offering his broad back as further protection from any onslaught. Kabahat grinned or grimaced, who knew, disclosing a double row of needle sharp teeth. It reared up high, to strike a death blow.

Leliana dove in and drove her favored side dagger, Lady Jocasta's Revenge, though Kabahat's twisted spine. It wailed in agony, curled around on itself so that fangs could find soft flesh, but she had already somersaulted away with the hooked blade and a fat, dripping gobbet of the demon's flesh. It stalked toward her, nails clicking on the floor, black blood and flat coils of entrail drooping from the hole torn in its abdomen. Kabahat seemed no worse the wear for his grotesque maiming.

Vivienne took the moment of surcease to weave her protective barrier around the injured man on the floor, and Dorian set three shadows of Leliana dancing to different corners of the room. She mouthed a silent thanks to him, to both of them, when it caught one of the shadows and tore her to hazy, purple shreds of smoke. Solas, for his part, reeled against a far wall. The success or failure of a mighty spell, such as drawing a particularly subtle demon out of hiding in the Fade and enraging it to the verge of madness, had proven exhausting. It seemed like one of the principle rules of magic; no work done with the mind was less backbreaking that it would have been with two hands. This, perhaps, was truly why magic did not rule over man.

One who might have known the answer, the Chantry's line of defense between the world of mages and demons and the common people, watched the chaos unfold. Cullen reached into his pocket, fingered the philter of lyrium. He drew it out, let the silvery liquid metal roll behind curved glass. Months. It had been months since his last draught of lyrium. Months of shaking hands, sweating through the night and keeping down little enough food to starve a walking corpse. It beckoned, smooth and seductive. Its curves would roll around his tongue, just like a kiss from Stefanja Amell or Bethany Hawke, just like a woman. It had been months. But his vow... if it ever meant anything more than Chantry propaganda, if any shred of the Templar remained after Kirkwall... surely this was the time.

Damn this lyrium, damn me and damn you most of all, Kabahat, Cullen thought. He popped the philter's cap and drank deep, months of effort evaporating in one sweltering, metallic kiss. The old, familiar power surged through his veins, comfortable as a Templar's heavy plate and swirling vermillion cloak could never be. He watched each mage in the room slow and sag. Vivienne's barrier around Blackwall and Josephine flickered once, twice, three times and then stayed gone. The shadow-Lelianas puffed into nothingness, one right from in between Kabahat's jaws. The time had come. Cullen raised his hand, sent a prayer that he knew as well as his own name to the Maker.

Heaven's wrath fell in a column of white, blinding light. It struck the demon. Kabahat flung itself to the floor and writhed, wailing. Cullen tried to draw his sword, press the attack, but found his thighs leaden, head foggy. The laboratory reeled. This was, he supposed, the price for getting out of practice. He hadn't been to the training grounds with the soldiers for months, now. Lyrium, well... if you weren't prepared it could hit you like Iron Bull swinging war hammer. That was one of reasons that Templars adhered so strictly to their regimen of physical discipline and training. Thy body is a sword, the canticle read, an offering unto the Maker. Leave it not unhoned, lest darkness burst thy flaming bulwark. Deep within the Canticle of Fire and the Sword... was the Order so far behind him that he'd forgotten even this?

Apparently not. He had called for heaven's wrath, and the Maker still answered. And there were other skills available. "Quickly!" His voice, croaking and unfamiliar, broke over the demon's unholy clamor. "We must rally. Someone strike it down or dispel it, before it recovers. His stupor won't last forever."

Dorian, slumped against an upended table, groaned. "Mine might. You've quite taken the fight out of me, old salt."

Merrill, on her hands and knees, coughed. "It must be like spells we're not fully used to, the poor dear. I mean, if I tried to heal someone I'd probably blow my own legs off. Or theirs. Or someone elses who was totally unrelated." She struggled to rise and fell to her side. "It's why I just use potion."

"Regardless, we are still in a rather bad situation, my loves." Leliana gestured to Kabahat. "Watch, it begins to stir." She gripped Lady Jocasta's Revenge and commenced the crawl, less than a two yards but miles long, towards the demon. 

That's when Cole, all but forgotten, emerged shining from his shadowy corner. A glimmering nimbus, bright as Cullen's lance of heavenly energy, surrounded him. "By the Maker," Vivienne said. "He must have been skulking along with us the whole time."

"He was with us in Josie's room, when we first learned of the demon's machinations," Leliana said. "He wanted to come along, to see Solas, to see if he could help. I suppose we just..." She sagged, uncomfortable with ever saying this in her role as spymater. "I suppose I just lost track of him."

Fiona, finally, had regained a sitting posture. "Don't blame yourself, Sister. We all did, and many others besides. The Ghost of the White Spire." She stroked her delicate chin. "I wonder what guilt he may carry?"

"As much as some, less than others--far, far less." He floated, as much as walked, toward the pathetic creature lying on Minaeve and Helisma's floor. "It's frightened as we are, and hurt. Kabahat. Guilt or shame in one tongue or many." He knelt by the squirming creature. "Have you feasted enough that the weight of it all sours in your belly, drags you down?"

Blackwall rolled onto one elbow. His remains of his jerkin, damp with blood, stuck to his hairy, barrel chest. "Careful of those talons, lad. If it's in pain then it might lash out. You'll not appreciate the results."

"It will or will not. If it does, then I will lie rent. If it does not, then we may talk." He turned blue, pleading eyes toward them, to Solas in particular. "Can I help?"

He nodded. "Go ahead, Cole. Do what you were created for, what none of the rest of us could ever manage. Show it compassion."

Cole leaned over the demon. He placed the tips of his long fingers on its temples, or at least where they'd have been on a humanoid figure. His eyes slipped shut. "Return to the Fade, Kabahat, and trouble us no more. This world is cruel and your lust for it has made you so. Go back to where you belong and do good work, if you can... be what you can be and not what you are, Conscience."

"Solas," Leliana said, "is what he is attempting even possible?"

"I would have said no. In all my years of wandering the Fade, at least, I have never seen it." He shrugged. "I'm not omniscient, though. There are so many things in the Fade that I would have never dreamed."

Dorian cackled. "Things in the Fade that you would have never dreamed." He slapped his knee. "That's utterly delicious. Someone must have dreamed them, my man."

Vivienne shot an elbow into his ribs. "Hush, you. This is an important moment--serious. We could be learning something about the very nature of reality itself." She did allow herself a smile. "Although... I can't deny the richness of what he just said, you have me there."

"I know, right? Dreaming, the Fade..." Dorian side. "I do so love a good pun; even better when it happens naturally." 

"Yes, that's probably why you're going to die alone, dear."

Solas ignored them, drew closer to Cole and Kabahat. "Keep working with it, Cole. It doesn't want to be here anymore than we want it. This world is cold and frightening, beside the Fade." He gripped the young man's hand. "I'll lend you as much of my strength as I can to send it. Stay strong."

"I'll... try." Cole stroked its slick, oily forehead. "A cancer. A thief. The black wall. You destroy, a weight around his neck, a boot crushing her throat. You must stop. Be as you should. Conscience. The reason a man cannot kill and go without it pricking his soul, a woman cannot abandon her friends to death. Be as you must for the world to go on."

Kabahat smoked, struggled once, and lay still. It faded, washing into pastel and then nothingness. Only wisps of steam and a stain on the laborator's carpet remained of the being that had come close to ruining them, had tortured Josephine for so long. Cole rose, dusted the front of his tattered jacket. "It is finished."

Josie disentangled herself from Blackwall, already busy applying a poultice she'd gotten from Helisma to these latest stripes he'd earned in her name. "Do you think it worked? Has... it... found peace?"

Cole shrugged. "I do not know. I can only tell you that it is not here, anymore. We are alone."

"I am as lost," Solas said. "I would like to say yes, that Conscience is at peace and acting as it should, but..." He spread his hands. "The ways of the Fade and spirits are not our own. It may be that it is dissipated, or merely banished. Much of what has happened in their world, in the last year, has been as unprecedented as the events in our own. A ragged sky, a bleeding Veil... denizens on both sides have suffered. In the end, we can only trust to hope." He drew the elven rune for it, in the air, using one of his veilfire tricks.

Josie pushed a stray lock of hair back from her face. Her fingers left a bloody smudge on her forehead. "That is all we can trust anyway, these days. Or..." She cast her gaze around the room, letting it fall on each of them, lingering on Leliana and coming to rest finally on Blackwall. "I do not know if that is true."

"How grim," Dorian said, "that you do not even think we can trust to hope. Here I had always pegged you as an insufferable optimist." 

"That is not what I mean, ser altus." She smiled. It was, in spite of her new, impromptu approximation of Qunari vitaar, radiant. "I have come to believe that we can trust each other. Thank you all for helping me; mille grazie from the bottom of my soul. After all... you may just have saved it."


	11. The Door Remained Unlocked

Josie sat at her vanity, a sumtuous affair of carved ironbark from the edges of Arlathan Forest that had traveled with her all the way from Antiva City, and pulled a whitewood brush through her dark, tangled curls. Her reflection, in a mirror of true glass from Par Vollen instead of polished copper, scrunched its face at her in aggravation. After the day's events it didn't seem like her hair would ever do what she wanted again--the knots were there to stay and might not be removed without siege equipment. The thought of attacking her own scalp with trebuchets, onagers and mangonels almost drew a giggle, but the brush's teeth catching in a particularly wicked knot killed the glee at birth.

Leliana perched on the edge of her bed, legs crossed, plucking idle notes in a minor key on the fat lute Ravin Brosca gave her. They rang mellow in the air, sweetly scented by bowls of hibiscus petals that Josie had set to burn over candles. "You've been at it for almost an hour, Josie. You're going to pluck yourself balder than Solas if you're not careful."

She picked at cruel tangle with her fingers before trying to draw the brush through it again. "If I do not get this under control tonight I will look madder than Yavana by daybreak."

Leliana shrugged and ran down a chilling scale. "Suit yourself, choupinette. I would think that after the day we've had you would fall into your sheets and sleep for a week." She let an infernal triad hang for long seconds before trailing towards its resolution.

"I have meetings all day tomorrow, my love, and Lord Trevelyan and his party will be home soon. It would not do for the Inquisition's Ambassador to wander the halls of Sky Hold more fearsome in aspect than some beast from the Deep Roads." She tilted her head, as if to catch the music in her ear. "I don't recognize what you're playing... is it new?"

"Yes, I'm composing but not having a world of luck." Leliana blew a strand of coppery hair out of her pale eyes. "It is... most difficult to translate the Fade into anything, even something so sublime as music."

"I think the song will be hard to listen to, anyway, dear heart. What we experienced together was bizarre, and what you have told me horrific past words."

"What of Blackwall? Has he told you anything?"

"No. When I asked him, all the blood drained from his face and he staggered toward the tavern. It must have been..." She shuddered. "I cannot imagine what might drive so strong a man so near tears."

"The treasures we hold dearest are those that cut us deepest, sweetling."

Josie smiled over her shoulder. "A line from the composition?"

Leliana shrugged. "I think so. It feels right. I hold Ravin and Justinia nearer my heart than almost any, save you, and even for Marjolaine a spark of love remains, buried. Poor Tug and Sketch..." She struck a dissonant chord. "I had not thought of them in ages. How awful of me..."

"Not really. You moved on, as they would have. Life is for the living, and precious. If I have learned anything from this it is that."

"I shall work that into the song--with credit to you, of course." She stopped to adjust her tuning. "I don't suppose there'll be any chance at all of getting a story from Blackwall to make the fourth verse, will there?"

"I think prying would be cruel. What is the structure now?"

"I begin with your dream, touch on our council and song, and then detail our adventures in the Fade before finishing with the battle in Minaeve and Helisma's laboratory. The bridges reference the lullaby we uncovered, and the chorus the Canticle of Trials in honor of Cullen's sacrifice."

"It sounds beautiful, cara, and I will be honored to be your first listener when all is complete."

"Marvelous. You're a much better first listener than Shmooples." She grinned wickedly. "He doesn't offer much constructive criticism beyond snuffling."

"Nugs are not held in reknown for their contributions to musical literature... even the cute, pink ones."

"Which, alas, leaves me to labor on my own." Leliana stretched, yawned and stood. "I think that I shall retire for the night. The phrases are just repeating in my mind, without much sense or rhythm. That won't get me anything other than a headache."

Josie laid the brush down and raised a powder puff to her face. "Inspiration will come to you in time, dear heart. One cannot force these things." She applied the dusty stuff in a cloud from her hairline to the bust of her lacy, purple nightgown. "Will you be leaving by the door or secret passage?"

"The passage, of course." Leliana gathered her instrument and notes. "I am the mysterious Nightingale, after all. I can't be seen padding around the corridors like a common housemaid."

"Of course." She rose, politely, while her friend vacated the room and then reseated herself. Before she could open the jar of sweet smelling embrium oil to run through her hair, though, a hand--heavy but hesitant--tapped at her door. She glanced in its direction. "Come in. It is not locked."

Blackwall entered, one shoulder bulky with bandages beneath his night-shirt. "Not terribly safe, Josie. There are more tangible dangers than the one we faced today, after all."

"After what we just went through I do not think a footpad, cutpurse or desperado could do much to impress me, ser."

"And yet his dagger in the dark could leave you just as dead as a demon's fangs."

She shrugged. "I am Antivan... we live so closely side by side with assassins, each day, that they are just another annoyance, like the horseflies and stinging gnats, or the fishy reek of canals. If I was to jump at every shadow they would revoke my citizenship."

"I'm beginning to think that common sense is entirely against the law, up north. Maybe even against your religion."

"Perhaps. But, if it will make you feel better, I will check the door before I go to sleep. I do lock it then, anyway."

"Why not before? Much safer, when you're vulnerable like this."

"I would never want to chase away someone who came to me for a meeting, something important, even at the latest possible moment. Lives could hang in the balance."

"On the edge of something that cannot wait until morning?"

"Yes, from time to time. More often than I would like." She began working embrium oil through her curls. "Just as you keep your sword honed and arm strong, I must stand ever ready to take care of the business of the Inquisition--day or night."

He flexed his shoulder. "If I keep getting into these scrapes I don't know if I'll be able to keep my arm on my body, let alone strong."

Her eyes shimmered, darker than potent wine in the candlelight. "I am sorry to keep entangling you with my affairs, like this. I hope that I am not becoming more trouble to everyone than I am worth."

"Never."

"Really?" She half-smiled. "Because between the duel and today, you have gone through a lot on my behalf."

"Really. You are the the glue that binds our Inquisition together, Josie. Never forget that. Without you, Lord Trevelyan and the rest of us would be blundering around like druffalo in a Val Royeaux tearoom." He seemed to be watching his feet, carefully. "Beside that, even if you offered nothing to the Inquisition... you would be worth all this trouble and more as Josephine Montilyet, nothing else."

She sat on the edge of her bed, patted beside her to invite him to do the same. "Grazie, cara. I could not have doubted how you all cared for me, after today but... it feels good to hear all the same. Sweet as a song."

He eased his heavy frame onto the mattress. "A song, aye. Is Leliana still working on her piece, regarding our adventure?"

"Si, but certain details--musical and lyrical--elude her. She is most distressed to have omitted your verse, ser, and I think it is making the work of composition more difficult."

"Then difficult the work must remain, confusticate the prying woman. What I saw was ugly, ugliness in me, and I can't bear to share it with you. Not now, maybe not ever."

"Uglier than the torture she endured, or what we three faced together?"

"If you can believe me, and I do not know if a woman as good as you can, yes. Deeds and words so dark that the Abyssal Rift could not bury them."

She let it lie. "I do not know if it matters. Regardless what you may have done, I do not believe a man beyond redemption would have done what you have for me--and so it may be that you are redeemed." She leaned heavily on his shoulder and yawned. "I am not the Maker, so I cannot tell you."

"I do not even fear the Maker so much as what I saw."

They sank to the top of the covers, exhausted. "Then close your eyes, cara. Maybe you will not see it." They slipped deep into sleep. The door remained unlocked.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Finished! My longest work, including Master's degree related things. It was difficult to write but very rewarding. And so to new projects, allons-y!


End file.
